Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Realty Talk Vault: Rental Reveal

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

We bring you another classic Realty Talk episode from the vault, which was originally published on November 30, 2021, but is still just as relevant today. In order to lease your property quickly and achieve the highest rent with the best tenants, Lauren Robinson from Rental Results reveals how you need to market your rental property to achieve the best rent, with the best tenants in the quickest time.  RealtyTalk is part of the Property Hub podcast channel, your home for property investment insights, inspiration, and stories from Australia’s top property experts, investors, leaders, and analysts. Subscribe now to get every RealtyTalk episode delivered to you each week for free, and also get full access to Get Invested, the leading podcast for Australians who want to unlock their full ‘self, health, and wealth’ potential and get inspired by the stories of investors, founders, and entrepreneurs. Subscribe to RealtyTalk on the Property Hub channel: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Email Property Hub is a collaboration between Bushy Martin from KnowHow Property, Kevin Turner from Realty, Andrew Montesi from Apiro Marketing and Apiro Media, and Australia’s largest independent podcast network DM Media.  Business and partnership enquiries: [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Now, regardless of how tight rental vacancies are, when it comes to the crunch and getting your investment property leased as fast as possible at the highest achievable rent and attracting the best available tenants, how you market your rental property to stand out from the crowd will have a big impact on your success. So to discuss how to do this, we're joined by leading independent property manager, Lauren Robinson from Rental Results, who's also the author of her great book, Rented. So welcome back to the show, Lauren. Oh, thanks so much, Bushy. It's a pleasure.

Great to see you. And you just shared with me a minute ago that you're about to add to the family. So I'm very appreciative of you coming on board and we all wish you the best and health for yourself and the new baby when it comes. Thanks, Bushy. Yep, excellent. Terrific, Lauren. Now, getting into the subject of marketing your property, let's start off with what mistakes that you see landlords making when marketing their rental properties. Yeah, I think there's a couple of mistakes I typically see and it comes back to not understanding the demographic of tenant that your property is likely to appeal to. And I think also underestimating the value of presenting the property online in a way that's going to be really appealing. So we've all seen those photos online where it's been taken by a dodgy camera or an iPhone and it just really does not appeal to the widest market. so i think really don't underestimate the power of professional photography 2d 3d floor plans

really what you know in this day and age we're doing 360 degree virtual tours especially with um you know often you know restrictions come into place where tenants are unable to make the inspection so it's really important to treat the marketing of your investment property as you would a sales property so yeah yeah it sounds good well you've sort of started to touch on some of the the options that they need to be looking at already. But let's dive in then to how investors can successfully market their rental properties. Yeah, I guess the first tip to make sure the property stands out online is to have really good photography. So engaging the services of a professional photographer and making sure the best features of the property are highlighted

so that with the right angles, best lighting. So it really encourages the largest pool of potential tenants to be coming along to the inspections. Secondly would be adding the floor plans. So ideally 2D, 3D floor plans, the tenants can really get a feel for what the layout of the property is like, how large the bedrooms are, and whether that's going to suit their own personal needs. And then also a 360 degree virtual tour. So that's really important too, the interactive tours that give tenants a great idea of what they're going to be walking into before actually turning up to an inspection they're quite fun to to utilize as well and then also making sure that you understand the demographic which I spoke about before but it's also you know if your property is

a position near a school it's a house you know it's likely to appeal to a family and also knowing that you know lots of families have pets so whether it's got a fully fenced yard for children or pets is really um appealing so i'm really making sure that the ad's written well to attract the largest pool of people yeah a bit of an art form there but those uh things you mentioned like the 3d walkthroughs and whatnot are they and the 3d floor plans are they expensive to orchestrate lauren um i mean we in our office we do the 360 degree virtual tours ourself and we've found them a really great value ad um not only do we do them for um the marketing initially but also they form part of the entry condition report and vacate inspections as well so that no surface gets left

um unturned the other thing um i guess with the photography 2d 3d floor plans and even the mataport tours or the virtual tours a lot of companies these days offer a package for that so you know realistically you'd be looking at under 500 to get everything marketed and presenting really well online yeah brilliant and and if you get good quality photos and good quality production then it's not a one-hit cost because potentially you can reuse some of that moving forward if you have a changeover yes definitely yeah brilliant okay and so you've covered most of that are there any other innovative or non-traditional ways that investors can market their property to separate theirs from the rest of the pack laurel yeah um i think also like there's

a couple of things so when it comes to knowing your demographic it's also knowing what that particular tenants are going to be looking for in a rental property so if it's a you know for example I've got a rental property myself in St Lucia near the University of Queensland tenants in that property typically don't they're not necessarily needing you know a dishwasher and those sorts of things because the demographic is students whereas if it was a family that's sort of a non-negotiable deal breaker for a lot of families especially if they're both working so I think it's really understanding who is actually going to be renting this property and then what do they want in that property so there's a couple of ways to find out so obviously speaking to a

local property manager and asking them you know what what's the demographic and who's likely to rent this property but also getting the feedback after the inspections from tenants to ask them was there anything additional that you'd like to see in this property that would make it more appealing to you and I think you know definitely things like storage making sure that you know it just has all those features and additional things that people look for like car parking storage accessibility safe secure those types of things but when also when it comes to marketing the property online it's also making sure that's available in all the portals that tenants are looking at so you know like the major ones like your realestate.com your domains but

also we spoke earlier about facebook local facebook groups and there's a lot of other alternatives available for um tenants who are looking for rental properties too yeah i love it yeah that's certainly yeah a lot more opportunity than what there ever used to be and i guess covid has forced us to be a little bit more creative about doing a lot more of that virtually and online so yes so that's uh really interesting and i really thank you for those very timely reminders lauren and thanks again for your time on the show today thank you bushy well if you're looking to successfully market your rental property, remember the old adage that good marketing makes the property look great, but great marketing makes the tenant feel great.

And the best way to do that is to grab a copy of Lauren's book, Rented, and engage an independent property management specialist like Lauren and her team at Rental Results.