For Property Agents: Ensuring A Steady Income During Covid-19

The impact of Covid-19 on the entire Real Estate Industry is real. With the impending recession, one of the biggest concern would be in ensuring a steady income during this period.

Property transactions will most definitely fall, but here’s an interesting piece of nugget for you:

As a marketplace, we’ve noticed a lower-than-average growth in our ‘for sale’ listings, but still see robust activity happening in our ‘for rent’ listings.

Introducing Rental, your unlikely iron rice bowl.

Yes, you read that right. Perhaps it’s time we ditch our pre-conceived notion of rentals being the less desirable of deals, and start thinking about how you can start getting on this bandwagon. While many property transactions have financial motivations, most rental transactions are motivated by necessity.

Put it another way: If a homebuyer is not able to buy his or her property during this period, there is a high likelihood that they would still have a roof over their head. However, if a tenant is not able to find a property, he or she would most probably end up without a home on the streets, so finding a place to rent is as important as having food to eat.

But with the lockdown, wouldn’t demand drop as there are less foreigners to rent now?

Yes… and no. The drop in demand would only happen as more and more foreigners in Singapore lose their jobs, thereby causing a dip in demand. We have yet to observe a huge spike in unemployment yet and on the contrary, we see a momentary increase in demand due to lockdown of our neighbouring country.

Furthermore, even if demand were to drop, the rental cycle would still exist. People would still need to find new homes after the end of their tenancy, and there would be hardly anything that would hold them back from completing their rental transaction during this period.

This also means that your likelihood of closing a rental transaction remains high. As long as you’re able to find a tenant looking to rent, your chances of closing this tenant is just as high pre -or post- crisis. You’re much better off investing your time in assisting a client driven by need as it increases your closure rate.

Furthermore, rentals can be great as you get to collect your commission much faster. This will definitely make the passing days more bearable as we wait for the Covid-19 crisis to pass.

Convinced yet? Here’s how you can get started.

If you have existing rental listings, consider listing them on 99.co if you haven’t already. We also do send weekly updates on the most coveted rental spots and tell you where the opportunities are, like this:

Quick Tip: Organically created rental listings are ranked higher on our search pages! Rather than waiting for your listings to get moved over by our Robot AI, consider creating your own listings for maximum results.

Additionally, if you’re looking for additional boost to your listings, here’s a quick hack on the best times to refresh your rental listings:

*We took into consideration the traffic in that given hour and also the number of refreshes that was already regularly taking place at that hour.

To read the chart, you just need to know that, the higher the %, the better the timing to refresh your listings. Or if you’re averse to numbers, just spot the very green cells. Red means hours that are the worst to refresh. Yellow means meh, and green means they’re the best!  If you don’t have time to refresh every day, try our auto-refresh function that refreshes your listings at your preferred time slot every day. 

What if you have existing supply on hand?

We’re not saying there are no interested buyers at the moment. There are, so don’t panic! But you’ll most probably need to fight ten times harder to get the attention of these buyers. Other than cleaning up your listings to make sure information is clear and concise, there are other more aggressive methods you can use to get more leads. A quick and low-committal way could be to refresh your listings to get it to rank higher on our search pages. Just for you, we did a similar Refresh table guide for ‘for sale’ listings:

If that’s not enough for you, try our Powerpusher tool that allows you to seamlessly set up Google and Facebook ads–all from your 99.co account. It uses the data of people who’ve visited our portal and targets them, great because you can be assured these are your high intent seekers. All these are also done automatically, so all you need to do is to set up a daily budget and your ads will start running.

If you’re keen, here’s a quick online guide on how to get started:

If you’re still not successful with the above, here’s an unpopular opinion: Consider convincing your seller to rent instead of sell during this period. Before you freak, hear us out. 

In this current market, we know property transactions are expected to drop, but not so much for rentals. This means you’ll most likely get more success in rental as compared to a sale. Furthermore, with it being a buyer’s market, even if you manage to get an offer for your property, it might not be a good one. Rather than having all the odds stacked against you, why not consider shifting your supply to rental, where you know demand still exists even in a crisis period.

Furthermore, having additional rental income during this period would mean your client will be less pressured to sell in face of bad offers, and that will help buy you more time to get better offers through the door.

Afraid your seller might call you crazy? Well, that depends on how you position it. If you ask us, this is how we see it:

We understand the reasons behind many agents choosing to focus on For Sale listings during their career (higher payout, less troublesome etc). However, in this time of crisis, it’s time for us to look at the facts and make a logical choice in deciding where we invest our time in order to ensure a steady income during this period.

Want to see what else we’re doing to help our agent friends? Check out our Agent Survival Guide filled with resources we have put together to help Agents tide through this crisis.