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Renting a London Flat – Don’t Get Mugged from a Gumtree Advert

Image representing Gumtree as depicted in Crun...

Image via CrunchBase

Be careful about carrying large amounts of cash. Admittedly this scam is less common with Flats, but beware taking large amounts of cash to meet someone that you don’t know, or to an isolated place, especially at night. It’s not just your money that you might lose, but also your life – a man was stabbed in the heart and left for dead after replying to a bogus advertisement for a car on listing website Gumtree. The 42-year-old victim took £5,000 in cash with him to a rendezvous in a street in east London with a man he believed was the seller. When he arrived he was punched and kicked to the ground by two men before being stabbed six times, his life was saved by a passer-by who intervened in the attack and the skills of air ambulance doctors who carried out open heart surgery at the scene. More recently a man was beaten and stabbed in east London when he went to buy a BMW car advertised on Gumtree. Now it is very normal for a landlord to ask for advance rent and deposit in cash, but be careful that you know the situation well. Best of all is to ask a Landlord requiring cash to meet you at your bank – withdraw the cash and hand it over on the premises. Don’t forget to get a signed receipt!

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Rent London Flats – Facebook to Replace Gumtree?

Pimlico Flats on Facebook

Pimlico Flats on Facebook

Last year I wrote about the changing face of London Flat Rental Advertising. In a series of 3 articles I traced the history of  how to find a London Flat to rent informing both tenants and landlords where they should be looking for flat rental.

In particular I predicted the death of Gumtree, dragged down by the predominance of scamming adverts. Originally Gumtree’s success was founded on a combination of free advertisements, and community, basing itself around cities and providing newcomers with a source of information on everything that they might be looking for. Gumtree still continues, with the new Beta version being commented on, and it’s charges ever increasing to cover the costs of the site revamp. It continues to succeed because it’s only major competitor – Craig’s List, – is just as plagued with scammers, and considerably harder to navigate, but now there is an alternative that might just sink Gumtree for all it’s new investment. Facebook Marketplace.

OK – I’ll be honest, not new – just new to me.  Facebook Marketplace was set up in May 2007, and in March 2009 ownership transferred to Oodle, a specialist Internet Classifieds website. It runs integrated with Facebook, and listings on Facebook Marketplace are syndicated onto Oodle’s website as well. The reason that I have chosen to highlight Facebook’s Classifieds as the website that will sink Gumtree is …… trust.

The biggest problem with trading on the internet is that of trust, and maybe Facebook have cracked the problem. A Facebook/Oodle Classified Ad comes vouched for by the Facebook ID that listed it, so the advertiser is no longer as anonymous as a Gumtree Ad. with a Hotmail eMail contact.

That strikes me as a powerful USP when you are looking to rent a London Flat.

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Advertise London Flats to Rent on Rightmove for Free

Advertise Free on Rightmove

Advertise Free on Rightmove

The free offer is the Tenant Find Service (worth over £200) and includes advertising on Rightmove (those in the industry know how much that alone is worth!). To qualify go to www.freerent.co.uk and register your property – it doesn’t have to be available for rent right now, you will be able to use the service for FREE in future if it’s in the first 1000. This started on Wednesday 2nd of September from 07:00 GMT and ends exactly 7 days from then (ends Wednesday 9th of September at 06:59 GMT).

London Flat Rental – the most effective way to advertise

80+% of flats rented in London are taken from an Internet advertisement – that’s what Pimlico Flats declared yesterday, and today we are going to split that down and tell you the internet strategies working for us. Our figures are approximate but we make no apology for that because our conclusions are clear and unequivocal. Over the last year we have been advertising widely and through every channel, and yesterday’s blog detailed our experiences with the channels that rented less than 20% of our flats. In the Internet channel we have advertised through pretty much most of the websites carrying rental adverts (list at end of Blog), and I drew up a list of those that have been successful in producing substantial enquiries. At this point I must emphasis strongly how inaccurate and unscientific this list is, many of the enquiries from website listings come in by telephone, and mail enquiries don’t always show the advertisement that prompted the enquiry, nevertheless I feel happy to report the pattern of response to our advertising as:

  1. Zoopla.co.uk
  2. Gumtree
  3. HomeHunter.co.uk
  4. MousePrice.com
  5. Livesimply

That list omits 2 sources which between them have provided well over half our enquiries – our website Pimlico-flats.co.uk &  Upad – these 2 sites have been omitted because neither advertises directly in a substantial way, our own website acts as our own private portal that all our advertising is directed to, Upad is an agent for private landlords rather than an advertiser.

From our tests and experience of the flat rental advertising market, there really isn’t any particular website that drives the greatest amount of traffic. If I was asked to name the best one, it would be Zoopla – but that would be a forced nomination as it would only comprise around 10% of our total enquiries. It may not be what you want to hear, but our simple conclusion is that there is no single outstanding advertising location on the internet – put simply you have to advertise everywhere. If we only advertised on Zoopla (our best performing single website) we would probably get less than 20% of our total enquiries, and frankly that is nowhere near enough. For the small private landlord for whom only Gumtree and Livesimply would be available the total available enquiries would be less than 20% of our enquiries, with the prospect of a long void before the flat is let. However last year a new agent called Upad appeared on the internet scene, offering private landlords the complete lettings agent service for low fixed prices, and this is the service that has comprised most of our recent enquiries.

In addition to their other services Upad offer to advertise a property on 120 different websites for a fee of £59. Is that a good deal given that some of those websites are actually free? Well I think so, and I use them and as the biggest landlord in the UK that must mean something (you’d have to meet me to understand that joke). Residential Land (the largest London Landlord by numbers of tenants, & who owe Royal Bank of Scotland £1000,000,000 – but lets face it who doesn’t?) also use Upad, and I think that there is a message here. Upad will advertise your flat on every website that offers flats for rent, and it will cost £59 – that’s just a day of a property standing empty for many London properties! Upad will advertise a Landlord’s property on all the paying websites that I have mentioned in this blog, and quite a few that I haven’t heard of, and most particularly all the websites that a private landlord doesn’t have access to. You might ask why I pay Upad to list my property on free websites such as Gumtree, Google Base, Craigs List, yada yada yada ……. OK – try this:- here is one of my Upad adverts - http://www.upad.co.uk/property.php?id=1558128 now do a Search on a specific term from that advert – 126 links to the most visited URLs on the internet. Now imagine how long it would take me to register accounts with each of those websites and upload property details and photographs! That combined with the access to the property portals not available to landlords is why I use Upad, and recommend them to other private landlords.

1994 – 1999 –  Loot was the only advertising medium that I needed

2002 – 2007 – Gumtree was the only advertising medium that I needed

2009 – Upad is the only advertising medium that I need.

If you are a tenant you need to read my blogs on how to get the best flats at the lowest prices.

Here is the list of websites that we have advertised on in the last year:

craigslist
dotHomes.co.uk
Enormo.com
Fish4homes
Freeindex
Globrix.com
GoogleBase
Gumtree
HomeHunter.co.uk
HouseLadder.co.uk
LetaLife.com
Livesimply
MousePrice.com
NetHousePrices.com
Netrent.co.uk
Pimlico-flats.co.uk
Property-Superstore.com
Surf4aProperty.com
ThinkProperty.com
Trovit.com
UK-Property-Search.co.uk
Upad.co.uk
Zoopla.co.uk

London Flat Rental Advertising Today

Renting a London Flat

Advertising to rent a London flat over the last 30 years was covered in our last blog, today I will summarise the current situation, which for property rental is currently in a great state of flux. The whole rental market is divided into landlords renting directly to tenants, and landlords renting through agents who collect the rent, and charge a monthly commission of 10 – 17% before paying the rent to the landlord. Letting Agents attract landlords because in addition to their own marketing advertising they are able to feed their flats automatically into property portals, which are the websites which tend to feature at the top of all Search Engine searches due to their budgets and expertise at manipulating the searches. There is a lot of argument and movement about which of the portals tenants will search, but roughly speaking the pecking order is:

1 RIGHTMOVE.CO.UK

2 The Digital Property Group

3 Propertyfinder Network

4 Nestoria

5 GLOBRIX.COM

6 Trovit UK Homes

7 ZOOPLA.CO.UK

8 Fish4homes

9 Mouseprice.com

10 HOMESONVIEW.CO.UK

Source:http://www1.propertyportalwatch.com/2009/08/globrix-com-hits-uk-top-4/

If a landlord wishes to rent directly to the tenant the only one of those portals that will accept a direct listing is Fish4Homes who charge £20, so until recently that left the private landlord with a limited choice when it came to listing their property. From my own experiences of advertising over the last couple of years I would report reports from the channels as follows:

  • Word of mouth. Absolutely fantastic, we get returning tenants, recommendations, and people who failed to get a flat from us waiting for the next vacancy. By far and away the best way to fill vacancies, without doubt the best way to get tenants is to be a fantastic landlord!
    • 100% conversion rate
    • zero cost
    • no effort
  • Free Agents. The central London lettings market has an excess of demand over supply, so some tenants jump the queue by letting through an agent who charges the tenant for an introduction to the Landlord. In most circumstances this is illegal, nevertheless there are reputable agencies who operate within the law – Central Flats, Flatland, and Interlet. These agencies will advertise on the Property Portals for the Landlord and then charge the tenant for their introduction to the landlord (typically around £150), but unfortunately they tend to operate at the lower end of the market and only Interlet have any success beyond bedsits. In addition to the 3 named agencies there are a number of bottom dwellers who shall remain nameless, but who feature in our series on Scams. If you want to know who they are – search Gumtree!
    • Zero cost.
    • a lot of effort as they aren’t the easiest people to deal with.
    • a bit hit and miss as you never know if they are going to feature your property or someone else’s.
    • Even the reputable companies named have a dreadful reputation with the tenant community.
    • No timewasters, they’ve paid, because they really want somewhere to live.
    • Poor quality tenants, they’ve paid because there is a reason why they find it difficult to be accepted by landlords.
  • Local Advertising. In Pimlico we have the disadvantage that Westminster City Council has banned Agency Boards, nevertheless they will turn a blind eye to posters displayed in a window (free). We have also placed advertising in newsagents (especially the one opposite a large Estate Agent!) (£1/week), and have a large 2m x 1m banner (the planning permission limit) on scaffolding when we have work being done (£50). We’ve had half a dozen enquiries all of which were either after something completely different (but couldn’t know until they had phoned) or timewasters.
    • Surprisingly expensive
    • A lot of effort
    • No benefit
  • Loot. Their online interface is utterly hopeless, of many disasters the biggest single one is that cut and paste doesn’t work, trust me – don’t waste your time. Telephoned ads can be placed, but I can’t tell you how much I have spent without it plunging me into a foul mood. Lets just leave it that I have spent more on Loot than on all other advertising put together in the last decade (that includes my disaster with Adwords) – and got fewer enquiries than the local advertising.
    • Expensive
    • Useless
  • Website. I’ll be Blogging about how you can get a website and blog just like mine some time in the future, but I would say that it’s an act of faith rather than a commercial investment with a return. I would say that to reproduce what I have would cost £1000 and take 3 years to achieve the necessary trust and authority from search engines. It is of limited use for direct enquiries from search engines, but invaluable as a destination for online advertising.
    • Cheap
    • A lot of effort
    • Establishes credibility
    • Only of use in conjunction with Internet Advertising
  • Adwords. When I set up my website I had a very clear plan – when I didn’t have vacancies I was going to run Adsense advertisements (look at the panel on your right, and click on anything that interests you, this will earn me a tiny sum from the advertiser). On the occasions that I had vacancies I would replace the Adsense with my own advertisements and run Adwords campaigns to attract traffic. I’ll give you some figures and let you work out whether this is a good idea – I currently make around £0.25p/day from Adsense (of which 10% comes from this blog and 90% from the website, it used to be £0.35p before the credit crunch & the decline of £/$). I spent £460 on Adwords and the Microsoft equivalent, but didn’t get any enquiries. An adwords consultant would say that the problem was my inexperience in setting up campaigns, and that if I had employed an expert to run the campaigns for me I would have got results.
    • Expensive
    • Nearly as effective as Loot
  • Internet Advertising. Internet Advertising is the biggest single way that we let our flats, we probably let 80+% through this route. It is so important that I will devote tomorrow’s blog to how we are currently advertising on the internet.

London Flat to Rent?

Where should you advertise?

I’ll tell you that tomorrow!

If you are Landlord you need to think hard about how you advertise. If you are a tenant you need to read my blogs on how to get the best flats at the lowest prices.

The Changing Face of London Flat Rental Advertising

I was reading the Gumtree Board when I came across this cry for help:

“I’ve been very happily recruiting lodgers from Gumtree’s short term section for nearly 4 years now, it’s worked really well for me and I’ve had lots of interesting and well-behaved tenants. But I’ve been advertising for 3 weeks now – not one response and only 28 views of my ad? Have the scammers driven the genuine flatseekers away?”

This rang a bell with me as we stopped using Gumtree a year ago after a series of abortive listings with no serious enquiries, and atrocious customer service over paid for listings which weren’t run. There is a market in London for advertising from private landlords who don’t want to incur a letting agent’s fees, and it is interesting and informative to review the changes to this market over the last few decades.

London Evening Standard

If you go back further than I can remember (and that’s quite a long way!) the only place to advertise a flat in London was in The London Evening Standard, which in those days was one of 2 evening papers published daily, and carried extensive Classifieds. Nobody looking to rent a London Flat looked anywhere else, and no Landlord advertised anywhere else.

Loot

The market was turned on it’s head in 1985 by Loot’s founder, David Landau, with the launch of a revolutionary new paper called “Loot” – a means ‘to buy, sell or exchange absolutely anything’ – and it turned the Classifieds industry on it’s head. It was  published every Thursday containing only 16 pages of ads, but uniquely instead of charging the advertiser it charged £1 for the paper. Although that was an extraordinarily high charge for a list of  classified ads people flocked to buy the paper as the free to list business model ensured that it would contain wonderful bargains. It became an outstanding success, and took over as the medium for London’s Landlords and Tenants. Nearly twenty years on I can remember my very first listing in Loot – it was viewed and let at 07:30 on the Thursday morning and the rest of my day was spent explaining to callers that the flat had been let.  At one point, Loot’s free-ads publication was published in 20 editions per week across the UK with a weekly circulation of approximately 180,000 copies and it held a monopoly in the field of private flat renting.

aBT buys Loot

Scoot buys Loot

The decline of Loot started in 2000 when it left private ownership and was sold to Scoot for £200M before passing into the hands of the owners of the Daily Mail. The simple problem was that having paid so much money the new owners needed to get a much higher return from the business than it’s private owners had been happy with. When Loot started charging Landlords for their advertisements, they moved on and soon the tenants stopped looking. I can confirm from 2 expensive advertising campaigns in Loot that it is no longer somewhere for landlords to consider advertising.

Gumtree

Gumtree

Gumtree

Gumtree was a struggling free Classifieds Website founded in 2000 by former bankers Michael Pennington and Simon Crookall, however when Loot’s need for higher margins result in commercial suicide, the website was able to step into the breach. During the period 2002 – 2007 Gumtree replaced Loot as the dominant location for flathunters, and for those 5 years Pimlico Flats didn’t advertise anywhere else. However in a story reminiscent of the Loot story, in 2005 eBay purchased Gumtree, policies changed to try to extract a return from the investment, and within 2 years the site was in the sharp decline reflected so aptly on their community discussion board. Just has Loot managed to destroy it’s own business by pricing out the bargains that brought paying viewers to it’s doorstep, Gumtree has become victim to a similar suicide. It has become a haven for scams of many different kinds (click on the Scam Tag in our Tag Cloud)  whilst simultaneously raising it’s charges to advertisers, and in consequence it’s listings have lost value to viewers.

London Flat to Rent?

Where should you advertise?

I’ll tell you that tomorrow!

Find a London Flat to Rent for Free

When people arrange to view our flats we always enquire where they saw us – it’s good marketing to know which channels are getting us found. As Lord Leverhulme (founder of Lever Bros. and Unilever) famously said “Half my advertising is wasted – but I don’t know which half!”.

The other day we had a lady come to view and the company that she mentioned as having advertised our flat wasn’t one that I have heard of, so intrigued I telephoned her to find out more. It transpires that a company has been advertising our flats, and then charging people £200 to give them our details for a viewing. Yes – the lady paid £200 for our phone number. We do put a few of our of cheaper flats with 3 agencies who charge tenants for flat finding, but these are reputable agencies that we have known and done business with for 15 years, and who make reasonable charges which last until the tenant has found a home.

I was prompted to write this article by finding our flats advertised on a website without our contact details, but a premium rate phone number for contact instead. I guess the website has to make it’s profits in some form, but it does make me wonder how it is that tenants can’t find good vacant flats in London without having to pay sometimes extortionate rates to an agent?

Obviously I need to write a tutorial on how to find a flat!

Use a Search Engine to verify London Rent Adverts

A simple trick will help you identify which advertisements have something to hide. The trick applies to any form of advertising, but I will illustrate it with London Rental advertisements. Put the telephone number shown in the advertisement into a search engine. You shouldn’t get many results for a phone number, but what you do get may tell you something about the person who has placed the advertisement. In particular scammers place a lot of advertisements. Although only a small number of them will get spidered by the search engines, that may be enough to give you the warning that you need.

For instance consider:

Self contained double studio, all nicely furnished, own bathroom, own kitchen, double bed.
Suitable for 1 or 2 tenants.
Located on Saint Georges Square, SW1V, minutes from Pimlico, zone 1. excellent bus connection, close to shops, restaurants and local amenities.
The rent includes all the bills and council tax, excl eletricity.
If you wish to visit this property, please contact Claudia 07554148467

That looks a quite straight forward genuine advertisement, with nothing to ring alarm bells. However upon Googling the Phone Number and then looking at the cached pages we find the same phone number being used on multiple advertisements using different names – Grace French and Georgette .

If you think that is unusual ……

Double studio for 1 or 2 people available now.
Studio is self contained and the rent is £170 all bill inclusive except for electricity.
The property is on St Georges Square which is 4 minutes from Pimlico Station zone 1.

This will go very quickly so should be seen asap.

Call me on 07770528552 to arrange a viewing


Lysette Cordal

in the same way is also Tracie Hallow and Tracie

So this is information well worth knowing, and very easily obtained by a quich search.

In case you wondered how I discovered this, I was researching studios because: -

Pimlico Flats have three studios available in April and May

Is Twitter a Medium for Advertising?

Dodgy Classifieds Website Gumtree has started broadcasting adverts into the Twitter consciousness

Is this going to work? My gut feel is “No” but I will watch with interest. If someone is looking for a London Flat surely they will go & search on Google? Or perhaps directly on Gumtree? What do Gumtree hope to achieve with this?

Your comments are appreciated.

Google Adsense & Adwords

We only have availability periodically & so we try to manage our Marketing by collecting income from Adsense on the Website, & then when we have a vacancy spending that income on Advertising (e.g. Adwords). We aim to break even – Adsense income paying for all the advertising that we do. The advertising will have the aim of renting our flats, but will have the benefit of boosting our Adsense income.
 
We would be interested in any comments about that strategy in general, in particular because Google Search degrades a page’s Google Rank if there are Adsense Ads on the page, which implies to us that we may be better off deleting all our Adsense Ads & relying on natural Search results, rather than paying for Adwords to drive traffic to our pages & hoping to cover the advertising costs from Adsense.
 
The 1st trial hasn’t gone well:
 
On the 6th December we placed an advert that resulted in 119 different visitors (more than normal). That day we received 6 Adsense clicks (we normally get 0,1,2,3) & a CTR of 26% (it’s normally <10%) & we earned ….. $0!
 
Normally a click earns $0.2 -> $2. Reading around implies “Invalid Clicks”. The clicks weren’t by me or anyone that I know (yes, I know that I would say that – but then I wouldn’t bother typing this question) – presumably because the daily activity wasn’t “normal”. If our Adsense income is disallowed every time we pay for advertising to drive traffic to our website we are better off not advertising and/or not carrying Adsense.
 
We would really appreciate your views & comments on this issue.
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Pimlico Flats Vacancies

Serviced Apartments £600 per week

New Build Studio
own large balcony
£1100 pcm
Mid March

New Build Studio
Own Roof Terrace £1100 pcm 17th March

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Tel: 07947 777575

 

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