Real estate letters
Property management prospecting letters
A landlord is not a vendor and should not be written to like one. They are not emotional about the property, they are running a small business with one asset in it, and the only two things that genuinely interest them are the net return and how much of their time it takes. Write to that and the letter works.
Written by Autopen Australia · Updated
To a landlord whose property sits vacant
Visible on the portals, which is how you built the list. Say so rather than pretending you happened to notice.
Hello,
[ADDRESS] has been advertised for [NUMBER] weeks. In [SUBURB] at the moment that usually means the asking rent is about five per cent above where the market is clearing rather than anything to do with the property.
Every vacant week costs roughly a year of the difference between those two figures, which is the arithmetic most owners do not run.
If you want a second opinion on the number, I will give you one at no cost and with no expectation of the management.
[AGENT NAME], [MOBILE]
To a landlord at the end of a lease
Hello,
The lease on [ADDRESS] is up in [MONTH].
Rents on [STREET] have moved since it was signed, and the renewal is the only moment in the year when that can be acted on. If you would like to know what the current figure is before you renew at the old one, reply and I will send you the comparable listings.
[AGENT NAME], [MOBILE]
To an owner self-managing
Hello,
Self-managing [ADDRESS] is a perfectly reasonable decision and plenty of owners do it well for years.
The point at which it usually stops being worth it is the first difficult tenancy: the arrears, the repair dispute, the tribunal date. If that has happened or you would rather it did not, it is worth knowing what handing it over actually involves.
Happy to explain it without a pitch attached.
[AGENT NAME], [MOBILE]
Getting it right
- What to mention. Something about the rental market in that specific pocket, what you would do about the vacancy or the rent review, and a number if you have one. Landlords respond to arithmetic in a way vendors do not.
- What to leave out. Fee-undercutting as the opening line. It attracts the landlords who leave over fees and signals you have nothing else. Keep the fee out of the first letter entirely.
- How long. 70 to 110 words.
- How personal. Businesslike. A warm, chatty letter to an investor who lives three suburbs away reads as a mismatch.
Personalising more than a handful
The fields that earn their place here: [ADDRESS], [STREET], [SUBURB], [NUMBER], [MONTH].
Vacancy and lease-expiry data goes stale within days. A letter telling a landlord their property has been vacant for nine weeks, arriving the week after it leased, is an advertisement for your inattention. Pull the list and post within the same week or write the version that does not merge a date.
Before any run, read the piece with the longest value in your data, the shortest, and the empty one. If all three read as English the merge is sound. Personalising direct mail at scale covers the rest.
Sending these at volume
Property management grows one door at a time, which means a small, constant, unglamorous run rather than a campaign, repeated for years.
Autopen Australia writes each piece individually with a real ballpoint, personalises every piece from your list, written into the sentence rather than dropped into a gap, hand-addresses the envelopes and lodges the run with Australia Post, or sends it back to you to release in waves.
Building a rent roll the slow way? See what the letters look like
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Writing more of these than you have evenings
Tell us roughly how many and what they say. We will come back with an exact price and a production window.