LetaLife saves marketing costs

A major expenditure in any letting agent’s budget is the high cost of advertising properties and marketing their agency via paper based media.

Unfortunately the effectiveness of such advertising is becoming less and less. The old reasons for purchasing a newspaper or searching through a paper directory are quickly evaporating as modern media provides a quick easy solution for those of us searching for the latest news, gossip and sports information.

Weather forecasts and television listings are easily available via teletext as well as on the Internet. Even the scantily clad page three girls have their own website now at Page3.com

Local newspapers are found online but they are fighting against the tide of modern technology and seem to be slow to realise that they need to do more than simply reproduce their content online if they are to compete.

Phone directories are generally less used these days as people again turn to the internet for a faster and cheaper service.

The future is in specialisation. Media within niche markets have an excellent chance of survival as they can provide expert and relevant material, which appeals strongly to their target audience. Advertisers know that the right people will be seeing their message and can more easily gauge the value for cost of their hard-earned budget.

The internet is full of niche websites. Websites which will be attracting the specific clients you are looking for. LetaLife is such a niche website. Each year for the past 2 years we have attracted over 2 million visitors to our website. ( 3 million + in 2006) Every one of those visitors was interested in the rental market place. Unlike some other high traffic websites, we only deal with rental property - of all kinds. So although there are other property websites with higher traffic, they will be split between purchasers, sellers and rental clients.

All our traffic is rental property traffic only.

For the intelligent and wise letting agent, this means good news. A clued-up modern agent can use the Internet to his or her own advantage at a minute fraction of the cost of the old paper based advertising budget.

The first tool in all internet advertisers belt should be a site called Alexa.com This is a website which ranks the popularity of websites according to number of visitors per million users on the web (reach) and by how many pages they view once on a website.

Alexa is part of the Amazon Group – the highly successful internet book selling organisation and they rank websites as a position in the top 100,000 So a number of websites can have the same rank (as they have the same numbers of visitors) and the lower the rank number the better the website is doing – for example Google currently has a rank of 19 and a reach of 19,900 visitors per million.

If you use the Alexa toolbar – it can provide you with comparative statistics for most sites you may consider advertising on. While these are not exact – they are a good indication of whether or not a site’s proclamation of huge visitor numbers match with reality. This allows you to make a more informed choice as far as where best to invest time and possibly money in placing advertisements.

From our own experience since setting up our own Property Rental Portal in September 2000 vast numbers of the UK population and those relocating from abroad - now rely entirely on the internet to find their next home. LetaLife is used to find tenants, landlords and letting agents across the UK. In 2005 we introduced a holiday property letting option as well, for property rentals internationally.

Classified property advertising is now firmly ‘happening’ on the Internet. The major strength of such sites is the facility to collect a huge number of adverts for rental property across the UK onto one site and yet allow visitors to find suitable accommodation right down to the local village/town level.

So someone typing a search term into Google (the most used search engine) will be able to home straight in to information on a popular site. That advert could well be yours and placed at no cost other than the time taken to visit our website and type it in. Or you could list your agency on LetaLife's Letting Agent directory and be one of the first agents that people find when searching on Google. To find out more click here

On the Internet – ‘Content is King’ and this means that people are searching for a result. They are not always looking for a landlord, but they well may be looking specifically to “Cardiff Bay apartment Rental” or other similar variations and places. If they type that into Google – they will find it – and then they will contact you – if your advert is on the page they click through to.

The chances of you achieving a top result in Google with your own website for numerous searches in your locality, without spending a great deal of money or a huge amount of time on Search engine tuning is negligible. Why bother? You can get the benefit from someone else’s site free of charge.

Spend your money and time more effectively and make use of our systems. We've done all the hard work for you.

Some agents view sites such as ours with suspicion. They are concerned that we might be somehow competing with them for business. The facts are that many landlords would prefer to use an agent, if they could be confident of finding a reliable professional.

It is in those cases that being listed on a reputable site’s agent directory such as LetaLife's, (which allows a registered 'paid' agent to reassure prospective clients by providing details of membership of professional bodies and other relevant criteria) becomes particularly useful.

In conclusion,any cost benefit analysis will show that LetaLife offers unbeatable value to Letting Agents, both for individual rental property advertising and for raising the agency's own profile ensuring a steady supply of strong leads.