Published 5 October 2021
Summer and September 2021 turned out to be the busiest period for us in the history of our company. The rental market is more complicated than ever, but even in the current conditions, we manage to find properties for our clients. This year we helped to move the record number of students and families relocating to the UK. 45 people in three months!
Clients who came to us complained that they could not find anything: good quality properties were disappearing from the market the day they were put on portals. Indeed it is almost impossible to rent a flat in Central London on your own right now. Even when an applicant enquires about new listings instantly, nothing is available. The earliest move-in date for available ones is the middle of November.
To help our clients we kept up with the new realities and adjusted our approach to work.
At normal times we used to send a selection of apartments to the client, he would choose the ones he liked, we would call and organise viewings. Now it doesn’t make sense because everything that is on portals is no longer available. Often proactive clients send us a list of apartments they would like to see, some of that ads are a month old. We use these lists to understand the client’s criteria but then organise the search in a different way.
Nowadays we source apartments for the clients only via direct collaboration with other agents. We send them requests with our criteria and they offer us suitable properties before they have been put on the market. This way we manage to get apartments for which the battle has not yet begun. Some realtors refuse to show their properties at all: if they have a lot of requests from foreign tenants then the apartment will be let without viewings, remotely. Personal connections and long-standing working relationships with agents help us to get access to the right properties and to show them to our clients even in such a competitive market.
The hunt for good properties is going on in all price ranges. For one of our recent clients, we found an apartment to rent for £13,000 per month. Our residential property consultant Darya Loginova organised nine viewings in one day, and the client made the decision quickly. Even with this high budget, our client’s offer was not the only one: the apartment had to be won among other applicants. We professionally negotiated the contract, managed to get a good discount, agreed on favourable terms and now are signing the deal.
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