Over the past 20 years, Gill Markham has worked for brands including rightmove.co.uk, Hambro Countrywide, and The Digital Property Group. Markham is now head of operations for the newly relaunched rentright.co.uk, and says the website “has the potential to rival any competition in the market place.”
What exactly is rentright.co.uk?
rentright.co.uk is a newly relaunched lettings-only portal, which has been redesigned for both the industry and end user alike. Established in 2004 as a letting agents directory, the last 12 months of development work have taken us to an exciting new level where we now have a product to match, if not rival, any competition in the market place.
What makes you stand out from other property websites?
In the past, the majority of portals concentrated their efforts in the residential sales sector, through both the sales and marketing strategies of their products. Lettings is a huge part of a lot of peoples lives now, and for too long has been treated as second best by many.
We aim to offer a service rather than just a profile and property listings. Our superb customer support and technical team contact our agents on a regular basis to make sure that we are doing everything possible to help agents advertise. Agents have their own profile listed on a random rotational basis that allows a level playing field for all agents and an equal chance at winning landlord instructions and maximising the agent’s brand awareness. The profile pages display industry accreditations allowing agents to raise their profile and show credibility in the market.
rentright.co.uk’s agent login has statistics that gives the agent transparency of leads and comprehensive telephone call reporting with SMS alerts so they will never miss an enquiry, even from withheld numbers. The property detail pages include hyperlinks to all other properties in the agent’s advertised stock. This means a higher click-through rate, keeping tenants within agents’ stock and leading to the possibility of more enquires.
Can you explain how the Residential Rental Price Index (RRPI) function works and its importance?
The RRPI works on a town and county basis, and is updated in real time to provide the average rents by property type/number of bedrooms, based on marketed prices of properties displayed on rentright.co.uk. Agents who are members will also be able to break this data down further by postcode to locality/street level.
The advantage of having such a comprehensive data set is that it will, over time, become the UK’s number one knowledge base of the rental sector for agents, landlords and end users alike. There is already media and government interest in the rental data that we have.
How do you make money?
As a newly relaunched business, we have spent considerable sums of money to offer the member and consumer a website that is both easy to use and innovative in its approach to the market. Unlike other websites, we have a pricing policy that offers real value for money, with no tie-in or contract and prices from £59.00pcm per branch. We are not looking for a quick recovery of money spent by having inflated prices or members tied in on lengthy contracts.
What is rentright.co.uk’s biggest challenge?
The biggest challenge faced in the market place is to gain brand recognition, which will take time to do, but Rome wasn’t built in a day! However there has been a good response from both independent and corporate clients so far, who recognise that there is most definitely a place in the market for a portal purely dedicated to lettings.
Who are your closest competitors?
Whilst there are well established portals in the market place, they are for both residential sales and lettings and we believe we have something different to bring alongside, and be complimentary to what agents already do, until such time that we offer a real choice for change. We are unique in offering rental property listings only (we do not diversify and offer any other listings such as jobs, trades people etc) and understand our core market.
Advertising Partner
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It looks like letting out – or renting out – is the way to go.