Case study: Estate agent uses SMS to boost profits.

You can’t guarantee if and when someone will read an email, but you can be pretty sure they'll read a text message as soon as they get it.

Mark Walton

We caught up with Mark Walton who was kind enough to share a few secrets of their success.

Tell us about Walton Robinson?

We are an independent property management agency. What that means is property owners hand their flats and houses over to us to find them tenants, manage the letting, collect the money, and fix any problems.

How do you use mobile?

We manage our agency using software called Gemini by VTUK. About 8 months ago they teamed up with mediaburst to expand the software so you can send text messages to landlords and tenants directly from Gemini.

We already used email marketing but text messaging seemed logical. You can’t guarantee if and when someone will read an email but you can be pretty sure they will read a text message as soon as they get it.

We started with access notifications and letting tenants know about contractors doing work. But we soon expanded it to include arrears notes, sales promotions and property availability. The benefits were immediate not only in cost savings and fewer access issues but also in the effectiveness of our office team. No longer do we need to ring around tenants and prospective tenants, or waste money on stamps, we just send text messages and they call us.

You mentioned your profits are up?

Yeah and text messaging has certainly helped us out. We’ve reduced costs and made our time more effective. We used to spend over £1,000 every 2 months on stamps alone. Now it’s a few hundred quid, and I haven’t even considered the cost of envelopes, paper, and printing.

On the sales side we have increased lettings by sending targeted offers to prospective tenants. Getting timely offers out means we get tenants in earlier. That keeps our landlords happy so we win more properties, and in turn we earn more management fees. It’s a win win situation.

What about any interesting facts about your tenants?

We found sending new listings and offers to prospective tenants are most effective at around 11:30am.  It turns out that this time even the laziest students are awake, but importantly professionals are approaching their lunch hour, a perfect time to visit our office.

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