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Write a great advert
and fill that vacancy.
When you are
looking for a tenant for a flat, room, house, bungalow or
an accommodation share, it makes sense to harness the power
of the internet.
First find the most cost effective property
rental website on which to place your 'To Let' advert.
If you are reading this you have already got that first
step right.
LetaLife.com sees over
3 million visitors a year and has been the most popular
UK Property Rental website for over four years.
Next, you
need to make the most of the advert you place in order to
compete with the other advertisers offering similar property.
Here are a few hints to help.
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Advertising
your rental property successfully on LetaLife's property
rental pages.
Don’t place
lots of duplicate adverts.
Choose no more than three places from the nearly 2,000
UK places we cover and place one advert per month per
property to let on those three pages. We really do read
all adverts submitted and we reject duplicates so you
will just be wasting your own time and ours if you try
to flood the site with your advert.
If you want to ensure
your advert stays at the top of the page - you can purchase
an additional 'keep on top' option when
you purchase
a standard advert . You can also select to 'cover
the county' as an additional purchase with your
standard advert. Both options are an additional £10
each. So for £30 you can ensure that for 6 weeks
you have an enhanced advert which stays above the free
adverts at the top of the page and also appears on every
town in the county of your choice to ensure maximum exposure
for your advert.
Keep your advert
short.
Most people are busy and have a lot of adverts to plough
through. If you want them to contact you so you can get
a chance to 'sell' your rental property – leave
them wanting more information – then they’ll
call you – giving you your chance. You get a text
box to fill in when you submit an advert on LetaLife -
if it gets too long to fit inside the text box and you
have to scroll down - then its too long.
Get your priorities
right.
Remember to state the important
facts about the property clearly and concisely. Like whether
it is a house, flat, apartment – and how many bedrooms
it has. Most importantly - don't forget to state how much
the rent is. When I was searching for property as a tenant
– I was completely uninterested in whether the property
had a feature fireplace – but I did want to know
how many bedrooms it had. Too many adverts go into minute
detail about unimportant things without stating the most
important ones.
Mention
if you'll accept Housing Benefit.
If you are a landlord who is able to accept tenants on benefits
please say so. We are always getting emails from people
on housing benefits saying they need property.
If you will take
pets – please say so.
Specify
what sort of pets you will or won't accept. If you don’t
want to deter non pet owners who may think the property
may be less pristine if you allow pets – state the
special requirements you have of pet owners eg. they must
pay for the property to be steam-cleaned after their tenancy.
Keep the advert
factual.
Avoid lots of personal details. A general indication
as to the age group and gender of current tenants in a
shared house is advised. We have had individuals who while
advertising a room in a flatshare, gave more of an impression
of a personal dating advert. These sort of adverts get
rejected. State if the accommodation is gay friendly if
it is.
Don’t
use ‘agent speak’.
Avoid such phrases as ‘The property boasts a feature
fireplace’ (that fireplace again!) and ‘staircase
leading to second floor’ (not much point having a
staircase leading to nowhere, or a second floor without
a staircase!) – it means nothing and we remove nonsense
from adverts anyway – unless it is completely full
of waffle and will take us too long – in which case
we just reject it.
Don’t use
texting language.
Don' try and make your advert interesting by weird choices
of capital letters and bold type face. We have a button
on our system which removes all capitals and bolding any
way – and we use it! If you want your advert to
stand out – especially if you are advertising a
property to let in a competitive area – splash out
£10 on a standard advert. Adverts which are unintelligibly
in 'textish' get rejected.
Buy
a standard advert. It is enhanced, it appears
at the top of the power search results, it gets online
faster and it says to the person looking – ‘I
take my advert seriously’. It suggests to tenants
that you are prepared to spend money where needed.
Give them what
they want. Tenants want – spacious, bright,
clean, airy.
These are not comprehensive,
but a selection of tips to help you when using the internet
to seek a room, house, flat or any other kind of accommodation.
If you think of anything that might be important to add
to this page please let us know.
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