CLIENT Q&A
· What are the typical issues faced by clients searching for real estate to buy or rent?
o Not having a central, reliable source of information (such as the MLS in North America)
o For those accustomed to a Multiple Listing Service, the lack of a buyer-side representative is frustrating
o Having to check multiple sites, contact multiple owners or agencies, often in a foreign language, in a market you do not know well or have not visited
o Personal information concerns: the need to distribute personal information (name, e-mail, telephone) to multiple agents, companies or owners, many of which do not respond but your personal data is out there already!
o Properties are not available, or already sold/rented
o Very difficult to validate data/information (too many repeated properties with different prices, too many outdated or sold properties, agents not responding to e-mails or phone calls, use of automated bots rather than humans!)
o The inability to visit, or the costs of a visit to a far-away market, and the lack of a single location that brings together the market’s supply
o Agencies not responding or not taking you seriously, often because they believe you may be “shopping” around with too many other agents
o Cancelled visits and risks of visits to the same property via different agents
o Historically everyone in the process is paid by the seller or owner, despite it being client money that unlocks the transaction
o All agents represent sellers and buyers have no independent, separate representation. No one in the process has their financial interest aligned with the client
o No continuity between the rental and sales processes. No single person to deal with the “process” i.e. a partner that is on your side as the client
o Not sure about whether to rent or buy: pressured by sales agents to buy to avoid “missing opportunities”; and told by rental agents not to risk “making an unnecessary mistake”
o Want to rent before buying, but real estate agents only want a sale and convince clients to rush into a purchase because of lack of long-term rental inventory
o The long-term rental market is still small and difficult to navigate
o Landlords not willing to register contracts or issue receipts
o Suspicion from landlords because of tenants requesting visas not knowing the country and wanting shorter contracts than those requested by consulates, or generous cancellation clauses
o Suspicion from landlord due to undeclared information such as pets, smoking
· What are the typical issues faced by owners and agents?
o Poorly qualified leads
o No knowledge of how to reach international clients
o High cost per lead in current real estate portals. No sites able to provide real metrics, therefore requiring risky and expensive up-front investment
o Large portals with a larger number of paid agents mean leads are distributed to more owners or agents, on average. Competition is going up and quality down, via paid channels
o Too great a dependence on one, or a very limited number of, source markets
o Too reliant on walk-ins
o Covid-19 and similar pandemic-style limitations, and not being able to meet clients face-to-face. Videoconference fatigue
o Difficulty in understanding client requirements due to language or distance
o Buyers and tenants inquire using different e-mails, fake names or different family members enquiring in parallel (and often with contradictory requirements)
o Too many “window shoppers” or “tyre kickers” i.e. people not serious about taking a decision
· Why do I have to leave my contact details before I can see more properties?
We know that clients search far and wide to find properties. Trawling web sites and real estate portals, posting on social media platforms and even “popping in” to a local estate agent during a visit, are all commonly used techniques by buyers or tenants. We have no issue with that, it is a valuable and often very useful method of information gathering.
However, at www.propertybuyorrent.com we do not wish to become another research portal, full of repeated or outdated properties, or that generate ad-hoc enquiries from folk who have a few hours free on a weekend and decide to send off some enquiries.
Because our team spend many man hours working on validating your requests against your criteria, we only want to speak to clients who are serious enough to tell us what they are looking for. After all, if a client is unable or unwilling to spend a bit of time planning their investment or move, then it is likely that they are not ready to take the step, or they perhaps do not place great value on their time.
We take potential clients through a rigorous pre-qualification process that helps clarify their options and only involve appropriate agents/owners in the right regions, correct type of property etc. Quality of contact goes up and wasted time goes down, for everyone. Sharing your profile and search criteria is the minimum requirement for us to make sure that when we make an introduction to an owner or partner agency, the client has completed a minimum of pre-qualification.
· Why do I not see the listing agency details?
For two reasons. Firstly, because we do not charge real estate agencies and owners to list, we make our money from a share of commission earned from a potential sale or rental. Part of this commission may come back to you at completion *. If we provided the contact details of the listing agency, as many sites do, our business model would be different – we would need to charge them, and possibly you, to access the site. And if we did that, we would not be able to share some of our marketing fees with you!
Secondly, because we try as hard as possible, to do the work of eliminating duplicate entries (sometimes difficult to do because agencies enter different information for the same properties).
* T&C apply, requires exclusivity
· Why can I not change my initial list criteria without waiting for approval?
The minute that your request enters our system, a team member (a real person, not a robot or automated routine) gets a warning and is allocated the request. This means that your initial request will generate work for our team.
If you change your request, some or all of the work may have to be redone, and the team will want to understand the reason for the change. In particular, the team will want to understand whether your circumstances have changed, whether you have adjusted the criteria because you now better understand the market, or whether your initial request was incomplete or incorrect.
To put it bluntly, we do not want the site to become a general search engine but a specific search tool that combines the power of automated search with the personalisation of human intervention. We want to make sure that we can help you think through your priorities to ensure that we can deliver efficient service and set of options.
· Why do I have to answer so many questions?
As is often the case, “what you put in is what you get out”? Put in a general set of data and expect to get back a very generic set of options.
· 3 reasons www.propertybuyorrent.com may not be a fit
1. You prefer to work with multiple partners and gather as much information in as many places as possible. Time and access to expertise is of less importance than making sure you are in control of the process. You prefer not to have to trust a single interlocutor, but rather share your personal data with multiple third parties to create your own network
o You do not mind sharing your personal data with multiple parties that you do not know
o You feel that you would be better protected by doing the research yourself
o You feel that by managing multiple agents you can make sure that you are not being “ripped off”
o You’ve never had the benefit of an MLS such as the one in the United States or Canada that allows everyone to see almost any property (even then, you entrust your search to a realtor that represents you)
o You just accept that because everyone else does it, you have to trawl through multiple agents and multiple listings, often without a trusted local partner (and, yes, trusted also means financially aligned with your success, not the seller’s)
o You are confident that you will find every single agent, and those you don’t track down are just not worth contacting
o You intend to become a “local expert” during your search, either in a concentrated process of a few weeks or months, or by taking your time over many years to build the expertise
o You are a super-networker who believes in their ability to build their knowledge and base of contact using social media, desktop research and the internet
o You think the contacts you make will be better than a trusted, ready-built network into which you can plug
2. You gravitate naturally to working with fellow countrymen or women, who give you the comfort of “understanding” you, than dealing with a more international team, including experienced local resources
o We all naturally gravitate towards someone from our own country, culture, and language, even if that person has only been (or may has never been) living in our preferred destination for a very short time
o Surely compatriots would always give fellow countrymen the best deals? Surely the waves of foreign “agents” who did not speak Portuguese and some of whom had never set foot in Portugal, descended on the country to help their fellow citizens?
o We suggest an easy question for anyone checking if an agent is independent: if you decided to rent before buying, would your local partner work with you every step of the way?
3. Cost of transaction is of no consequence
o Some people do. It’s a status thing
o Why say you negotiated a discount when you can tell your friends you bought a more expensive property than the next-door neighbour (even though the countertops and roller blinds are exactly the same)? We get it, it’s a status thing
o But crazy as it may sound, we know many millionaires who like to get a good deal. They understand that the best deals are done by buying right. With the right people. And the best process
o You do not want to earn back 1% of the purchase price (in addition to any discount negotiated) in exchange for exclusivity because you think you can always negotiate a larger discount, regardless of circumstance or context
www.propertybuyorrent.com does not aim to be a generalist search portal, of which there are already many, but to deliver a targeted approach for both buyers and sellers.
For buyers or renters/tenants, the more defined criteria we get, the better the short list you receive. The value of this approach is not what you, as a client see, but what you do not see. The ability for us to eliminate properties that do not match your criteria saves you, us and the owners or agents time in talking about something which will not be a match. As the sheer number of properties will grow to a very large number over time, the best value we can add is to ensure that anything that is not a good match is eliminated as early as possible.
For our listing partners, whether agents or owners, the likelihood of a better qualified prospect, with clear criteria, rather than one more generic “contact” via a property portal, is of much better value, especially in times of high volume of enquiries and low inventory.
· Combining technology and human intervention to create www.propertybuyorrent.com
· The team behind www.propertybuyorrent has years of experience of dealing with customers who start their research from abroad
· The team has assisted clients from 30 countries in moving to, or investing in, Southern Europe
· To date, the team responds to enquiries from almost 100 countries
· Behind the scenes, the team covers a broad range of areas of expertise, including long-term rentals, real estate sales, visa-related topics such as the D7 and GV (Golden Visa), and has access to a range of specialist expert partners in areas such as legal, accounting, insurance, mortgage brokers, car importation, etc. A search for a rental or a purchase is considered “in the round”
· www.propertybuyorrent.com is the part-automation of a well-established process, run successfully since 2015
· The www.propertybuyorrent.com approach combines internet and web-based communication, with e-mail, telephone and face-to-face communication (during visits) to ensure a balance between efficiency and personalisation
· The www.propertybuyorrent.com team acts as a knowledgeable, independent interface between client and seller/landlord/agent, helping to manage expectations in both directions