The results just in, hot off the screen are as follows:
Hodsons Abingdon 7 properties Go Robin and Joe!
Hodsons Didcot 14 properties Go Trudles! (she is good you know!)
Andrews Abingdon 8 properties Go Andrew!
Buckell and Ballard Abingdon 12 properties Go James!
Allen and Harris 13 properties Off to a good start....!
Lansbrough Lettings 11 properties Go Hadrian!
Chancellors 11 properties Go team!
Abingdon Lettings Centre 17 properties Go Dougie!
BlueDoor has 20 properties and none are advertised with any other agents unlike some of those above. I could pretend that I don't know what we are doing that other people aren't but I can't be that modest! We are the only people who will answer the phone on a Sunday and take on a property there and then if that is what the landlord wants. We are the only flat fee agents in the county and no amount of maths can disguise the fact that even 10% of your rent is often a lot more than our fee of £65 per month for full management. Oh and we'll give you £50 if you recommend a landlord to us and we let their property for them.
We have not been trading for quite three years yet and we already have a big share of the local and Oxfordshire market because we are unusual. Big corporate companies with lots of office space, staff, overheads and cars are becoming difficult to justify in this market. Slim businesses, smart use of time and frankly crappy looking cars are obviously the way to go!
How many offices have you walked past this week and seen people at their desks surfing the internet or making cups of tea? If you are a landlord you are paying for that to happen and if I were you I'd be wondering if my money was being well spent.
We had the pleasure of taking over the management of a property in Didcot this week and when I popped in to collect the keys from the old agents I was faced with a ghost of my corporate past that I thought was well and truly buried. I only asked how it was going just as you would if you bumped ito a friend in the street and I got a most bizarre response: 'I completed so many lets last month my conversion rate is 1 in 5 which must mean that my applicant matching is really good'. Gosh. Is that a good thing?
We don't use that kind of speak here. We advertise with lots of pictures, do viewings and let properties. We don't have a white board with targets, yields, conversion rates and completions which needs to be monitored and updated daily or someone gets it in the neck. I used to work in a place with one of those though and my colleagues were always irked that my numbers were regularly bigger than theirs in every column.
Smug, me? No, just quite good at this job!
Oh well that's my ramblings for today. Let me find a picture or two for you now.
First, these are our favourite locksmiths who we like because they share our view of how to get business done.
And secondly, probably the highest stairwell I've seen for some time. I don't envy the decorators who painted this! There are stairs there I promise, I just couldn't get the window and the stairs in at once without getting dizzy.
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