A Manchester agency is providing its tenants with round-the-clock service and winning new landlords because of it.
How does your business handle out-of-hours enquiries and issues? A Manchester sales and lettings agency has invested in self-serve technologies that provide their tenants with round-the-clock service, even facilitating callouts for repairs. Better yet, they’ve won new landlords because of their investment.
“A tenant could get in touch at four in the morning with an issue and, within an hour, they’ll have a response and someone will go out then and there,” says Joshua Gertler of Normie & Co. “It’s a real selling point - we can say to our landlords that their properties are being looked after twenty-four hours a day.”
Gertler will ask prospective landlords how their current agents deal with issues that arise out of hours. “It’s something that a landlord might not have considered before - they just assume that it gets dealt with. But when they have checked with their current agent and asked them what they do out of hours, they have realised that the proposition might be a bit weak and they may be a little bit exposed,” he says. “We've got some new landlords on board purely on that basis. They want the comfort of knowing that their property is going to be looked after, at all hours.”
Self-serve technology that provides a twenty-four hour service hasn't just been a boon to landlords; it’s also helped Normie & Co to meet the on-demand expectations of their tenants. Gertler believes tenants’ expectations of the service they’re provided by agents have become higher in recent years.
“Everyone wants everything right now and waiting is not an option,” says Gertler. “There’s definitely a very, very high expectation of us and what we have to offer. You do anything online and people have gotten used to services like Amazon same-day delivery and it means that they expect all services to be quicker and more efficient. Everything is speeding up.”
Normie & Co has addressed this through digital transformation, taking everything from the application process to property management online. “Technology has revolutionised the way we do things,” says Gertler. “Now, tenants just go online, and it’s a one-stop shop: everything is there and can be done in the click of a button. It’s definitely helped us to keep up with those changing expectations.”
