The world of property continues to be turned upside-down by technology. The days when people had to physically walk into a high street estate agent to look at photos of properties are long gone.
Although many people still like the personal touch, the first viewing of a property is now more likely to be conducted online. People will even have a virtual tour of a rental property and look at the area on an app or Google Street View. They can even find the average rental prices for the area online too. They can make viewings from the other side of the world and make contact with the landlord or letting agent from their phone.
This makes life simpler for landlords, but only if they are tech-savvy too. They will need to make sure their properties can be found easily online and that potential tenants can request information from them online too. The private rental market generally is getting in on the proptech act, with Zoopla and Rightmove having hundreds of thousands of properties for sale or to rent on their websites.
It is easy to access information about properties and landlords. With online letting agents replacing the traditional high street agents, competition for properties becomes more intense. On a site like Zoopla or Rightmove, tenants can see just about every property available in a particular area. Previously, they would have needed to visit every agent to make sure they had covered all possibilities. This means landlords need to be transparent and offer great customer service, or even value added features, to stand out from the crowd. This means your online reputation is so important. Your website needs to look attractive and have all the information a tenant needs, as well as opportunities to get in touch with you. Business people need to invest time into developing their personal online presence, including using social media.
Increasingly, technology will play an even bigger part in the relationship between tenants and landlords, by opening up new marketing opportunities. One area where this could happen is in virtual reality, which is likely to become more widely used. Virtual viewings could become a must-have feature for marketing properties, particularly in the new-build sector, as investors can see work in progress.
Therefore, it is important for landlords to adapt quickly to these changes. Tushar Agarwal, Hubble online marketplace founder and CEO, says that power is shifting from the supply side to the demand side in the property sector. He goes on to say that property is transforming from something restrictive, with long leases and large deposits, to become more fluid and liberating. For example, retailers can lease pop-up shops for a few weeks and companies can rent out their spare desks. Many tenants will also be changing the way they live and work as the internet makes it much easier to work from anywhere in the world. The way people rent property will change in the future and savvy landlords will prepare for this, so they do not get left behind.
InventoryBase is just one of the many great tools available to property managers or owners to reduce tenancy issues and maintenance costs. PropTech, as the industry calls it, is here to change things permanently.
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