Photo by Dragon Property
While quality housing stock will likely remain attractive moving forward, it’s important to ensure your HMO properties remain in high demand, allowing you to fill your rooms more quickly.
This can help you minimise void periods and boost profits, which can ensure your HMO portfolio remains successful and sustainable. Here are five of my top tips to help you boost demand and profits in your HMO properties!
1. Get the adverts right from the get-go.
For starters, you must get the adverts right for your rooms. This includes having high-quality photos taken and writing engaging descriptions that are effective in grabbing prospective tenants’ attention.
If you don’t get certain parts of your adverts right, this will mean your HMO rooms won’t stay at the top of the platform listings you advertise your rooms on, like SpareRoom. Because of that, it could be beneficial to spend some time testing out different things to find out what works best for your target tenants!
2. Be responsive to enquiries.
In order to get the best possible chance of converting enquiries into viewings and then viewings into tenancies, you need to set a goal of answering all enquiries within 15 minutes and offer viewings within 48 hours. If you don’t, other HMO landlords will beat you to it!
This is of course very challenging to do as this even includes enquiries that come in at night and on weekends. So, you need to figure out how you’ll manage replying as quickly as possible and be able to effectively engage with these prospective tenants who are reaching out.
3. Adopt systems and processes.
Implementing structure into your HMO business can help you be as successful and efficient as possible with filling your rooms. Adopt systems for sending out reminders to viewers, notifications of access to existing tenants and follow-up messages after viewings.
Additionally, put processes in place for how enquiries should be managed and viewings should be carried out. This will help ensure you’re organised and that these activities are being carried out to the standard you’re striving for, which can improve your chances of securing a tenancy.
4. Prioritise tenant satisfaction and retention.
While tenants will come and go, there are things you can do as a landlord to keep your tenants happy and make them want to stay for longer. If you can increase the average length of your tenancies and reduce the rate of churn in your properties, you can be more profitable.
There are a number of ways you can work on tenant satisfaction and retention in your HMO properties. For example, have a great tenant matching strategy, including finding tenants who are of a similar age with similar interests.
Additionally, make sure you take care of maintenance and repairs quickly and be a proactive and understanding landlord. And you need to step in and deal with problematic tenants, so don’t just stand by! Show your tenants that you’re dealing with it.
5. Make changes based on tenant preferences.
It’s really important for you to understand the changing needs and motivations of your target tenants. Adapting to these kinds of changes quickly can even help you stay ahead of the competition and allow your HMO properties to be in higher demand from prospective tenants
Tenant demands are regularly evolving, so be aware of the current market. This can help you make more informed decisions on your properties and help you future proof your portfolio too!
It’s crucial to stay on top of ways you can boost demand in your properties so that you can fill rooms quicker and make your HMO portfolio more profitable!
For more lessons, advice and tools on how to secure tenants quickly and manage your HMO properties, become a member of The HMO Roadmap today! If you want access to resources you can use in your own HMO portfolio, such as a tenant welcome pack and tenancy agreement templates, sign up for our premium membership.
And if you have any questions on filling your HMOs, join us over in our free Facebook Group The HMO Community, where we have experienced HMO investors on hand.
About the Author:
Andy Graham is the founder and the lead trainer at The HMO Roadmap! He is also the co-founder of The HMO Mastermind, writes as a regular columnist in different magazines about a variety of HMO topics and is the host of The HMO Podcast! Follow Andy on Instagram!