“We can be as flexible as the landlord wants us to be,” says the founder of a Northern lettings agency, where every single management package is fully customisable.
A bespoke approach to its packages for landlords has been one of the keys to success for a growing agency in The North, says its founder. When Charlotte Dodsworth founded Harvey & Ryall in Huddersfield three years ago, she knew that she wanted to offer her landlords something different. “There was a niche in the market for an agency that offered a more personalised, one-to-one service,” she says. “But every landlord is different and they often want different things."
One of Harvey & Ryall’s solutions is to offer landlords four different packages, ranging from its Bronze tenant-find package, to Platinum, which includes everything from professional property dressing to Goodlord’s Rent Protection and Legal Expenses Insurance.
Crucially, every single package is customisable. “We can be as flexible as the landlord wants us to be,” says Dodsworth. “Often, the packages on offer to landlords are fixed - they can either choose tenant-find or managed, but there’s no in between, no room for movement if they want to add or take away one of the services.”
“If there’s an extra service they would like, we can offer it to them for a small margin. It means that, no matter what package they’re on, if they are on holiday or they can't do something for some reason they can ask us to sort it out and we’ll do it. They really appreciate that.”
Harvey & Ryall has even accommodated requests from landlords for services they didn’t previously offer. “I’ve had landlords say to me ‘Charlotte, I really want to do this, but you don't offer it. Is there a way you could?’,” says Dodsworth. “I've gone away and thought, ‘Yes, we do that - these are our terms and this is how we’ll do it.’”
The agency’s personalised service extends to its tenants, too. “If they can’t come in to sign a contract, we’ll go to them. We like to sit down with all of our new tenants and tell them everything they need to know. We make sure that our tenants have one point of contact,” says Dodsworth.
“All of our customers have real respect for us, which you can see in our ratings and our reviews, and I genuinely believe that’s because we offer a personal, one-to-one service,” says Dodsworth. “We want to be able to offer more than anybody else can. . Yes, we may use a little more of our time, but we're not just wasting it. We're building relationships with our clients. By building their relationships, they stay with us longer and they respect us.”
