Charles David Casson, a sales and letting agency covering the whole of Essex for lettings, specialises in managing Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs). As well as using Goodlord’s Rent Protection and Legal Expenses Insurance, they’ve got their own unique way to guarantee rent for their landlords.
“We basically lease our landlords’ properties from them, on a guaranteed rent each month,” says Neil Baldock, Director. “We do a lot of that with HMOs. We'll agree on a specific amount with a landlord, then we'll run that HMO for them so they've got absolutely no hassle and they’re assured a certain amount of money each month.”
On the admin side, Goodlord works to support the agency to effectively manage the whole process, taking on much of the extra work normally involved in HMO management. "We can set the property up as an HMO on Goodlord, so we're not having to input that property multiple times for each room. We can just set it up as one property with however many rooms it has and then allocate tenants to each."
Joining Goodlord in 2016 has also eased staffing pressures and created a standardised and easy way to coordinate the tenant process. "Goodlord saves us members of staff. There's no doubt about that. We would have to have more administrators in the business if we didn't have the Goodlord platform taking care of that administration for us - and its completely systemised our tenant onboarding process,” says Baldock.
Compliance is another challenging area for agents, who have to keep on top of it all for the sake of their landlords - but Goodlord helps lighten that load. "We know our compliance is taken care of because the how to rent guide, all the certificates, everything that we have to cover is taken care of on the Goodlord platform. We've never missed serving any of them, which means great peace of mind for us as an agent."