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Aside from the daily management of your property business that you’ll always be doing, at some point you’ll want to explore how to grow. Business growth is a part of running a property business that is most often overlooked by letting agents.
We’ve already covered a lot of the things you can do to make your business successful in other blog posts:
In this post, we’ll be looking at a handful of tips to help your property business grow. Often if you’re up to your eyeballs in admin, these tasks get overlooked and stunt your business growth.
Look for Savings You Can Make in Your Property Business
Tax savings are a great place to start. Make sure you’re only paying the tax you need to.
You should also be monitoring the bottom line to make savings wherever possible. Keep on top of mortgage deals and get quotes when your mortgage deal is ending. If your insurance is renewing look for a lower quote. If you’re paying for utilities always make sure you’re on a good tariff and keep comparing energy deals to get the best prices. Keep an eye on your suppliers and again compare costs.
It stands to reason that the lower your overheads are the more profit you’ll make and the more you understand the tax system the more of those profits you’ll be able to keep.
Think in Terms of Scalability to Grow Your Property Business
If you want to scale your property business, then you need to think in terms of incorporating processes into your business and scaling said processes to make tasks quicker.
If you’re putting together a bespoke check-in document for a tenant and having to think about what you need to cover for every tenant that moves in it will take time and this is time you aren’t spending growing your business. If you have a process in place, this can reduce the time it takes to complete repetitive tasks.
Processes can speed up different tasks. For example, you might want to reuse a certain document regularly, or a checklist you’ve made for yourself to check a set of actions you perform. Create a process and it becomes easily repeatable and provided there are no crazy steps in your process it should be scalable. If you can pass this process on to someone else in the future, it will save you even more time and effort. So, whatever you do and whatever processes you put in place, think about whether those can be done at scale and keep saleability at the forefront of your processes.
Manage Long Term Rental Prices Using Discretion
Once you’re up and running and managing everything smoothly you might want to consider your rental strategy. It is common for landlords to put the rent up every year, but it isn’t a sound strategy for everyone.
Your rents will need to stay in line with market rents, and if you’ve got some good tenants in you might have to find the perfect balance of putting the rent up whilst not losing the tenant.
Prepare for Evictions
A section on evictions may seem incongruous when we’re talking about making your business successful, but how you deal with these definitely has a bearing on the success of your business – let us explain.
If everything goes smoothly you may never have to deal with an eviction, but from time to time it happens. If you’re using a letting agent, they will often deal with this for you particularly if you have a fully managed package. Agents will use collection agencies and they will have an idea of what documents to use etc. If you’re self-managing though you might need to do this.
If it is the case that you’re doing this yourself make sure you understand the eviction process and what paperwork you have to serve. There are a number of offences relating to illegal evictions and the punitive actions for falling foul of these range from fines through to jail time, so it’s worth making sure you’re doing it properly.
It makes sense for you to familiarise yourself with these rules even if you aren’t about to evict a tenant, simply because the rules require you to have provided specific paperwork on move in etc, so being aware of this and doing everything right up to the point of move in will make it much easier to evict if it ever comes to that.
If the idea of going through an eviction sounds like a nightmare to you consider hiring a professional. You might want to save money by self-managing your properties, but you can’t put a price on mental health. Evictions can be stressful and there are a lot of legal considerations, so consider paying a professional to handle this process for you if you would find that easier.
However you choose to handle evictions, they are unfortunately an essential part of growing a successful business. You will need to be able to handle them quickly as every day you aren’t getting rent is eating into your renal yield. This is one element of the job you’ll need to be able to deal with quickly and efficiently to grow successfully.
Courses to Improve Your Property Management Skills
You might struggle to find an all in one course that will teach you everything you need to know about property management. This is because there is a lot to learn, so any comprehensive course would likely take a long time and have a lot of associated material.
What you will find are courses that will cover certain elements. You might find a course on inventory management or a course on some of the more common legal issues you might need to be aware of.
As with anything you need to do the due diligence around any courses you take. These days anyone can put content online and call it a course without needing to be qualified. Make sure you find out how much material you’ll be covering and that the course covers what you want to learn. Read reviews from others who have taken the course and check the credentials of the person teaching the course.
You will be charged for most courses and these costs are sometimes tax deductible. The general rule of thumb on the tax deductibility of courses is that if you’re refreshing skills you already have then you can deduct the costs, however, if you’re learning totally new skills you can’t write this cost off.
There aren’t any specific courses we would recommend as what suits you will be highly personal, so instead here are a few sites to explore that have plenty of property courses:
