I have spent eighteen years letting property in Birmingham. When I started, letting a flat in the Jewellery Quarter meant persuading someone that the workshops and the missing supermarket were worth putting up with, and now tenants ring and ask for the JQ by name. Digbeth took longer, and I once walked an applicant the route from a flat to the nearest supermarket and back, because she asked me to before she would sign anything. What changed the job more than any of that was the 1st May this year.The Renters' Rights Act ended bidding above the advertised rent, so the figure on the listing is the figure you are working with from the start. Rental property presentation now does a different job. It decides how quickly a home lets and who applies for it, which makes it the main lever Birmingham landlords have left to reduce void periods. Below is what tenants look for across the homes we manage, and what I would sort out before a property is listed.

The advertised rent is now a ceiling

Landlords used to have a safety net. You could put a property on slightly under, let two or three applicants push it up, and end up where you wanted to be. That route has closed. Whatever goes on the listing on day one is what you live with, and the property has to look worth that figure in the photographs before anyone has spoken to us. When it does not, the property sits. On a rental property at £1,100 a month, a two week void costs £508, and it stays lost, because if the rent starts in the wrong place, the next chance to correct it is through a rent review. Rent increases are limited to once a year, and a tenant can challenge one at tribunal.

Most of it is decided before anyone knocks on the door

Fifteen years ago a listing was six photographs and a paragraph, and people rang the office to ask what the kitchen looked like. Now it is twenty images, a floorplan and often a video. By the time someone books a viewing they have looked at eleven other properties on the same portal, on a phone, in about four minutes. The photographs are doing all of the work. The ones that lose enquiries are predictable. Second bedrooms shot from the doorway so nobody can tell whether a double bed fits. Kitchens with the bin still in frame, rooms shot on a grey Tuesday with the ceiling lights off. And the listings with no photograph of the bathroom at all, which people read as a bathroom worth hiding before they scroll on. I would rather relist three days later with proper photographs than go live on a Friday with poor ones. Three days of delay costs £109 and a slow four weeks costs a thousand.

What people ask when they get there

Viewings tell you what tenants look for once they are through the door, and it is more practical than most landlords expect. They open the cupboard under the kitchen sink. Damp comes up before rent does. In older stock around Moseley and Harborne people check whether the back bedroom window opens, because they have lived somewhere it did not. Almost everyone asks who fixes things and how quickly, which usually comes from a bad experience with a previous landlord. I let a two bed in Harborne in the spring to an applicant who had already turned down three others, all of them because the second bedroom had been photographed with a single bed and a lamp and turned out to be a box room. By the time she reached me she was measuring rooms on her phone before she took her coat off. A property that has been prepared answers those questions on its own. Nobody has to take my word for anything, and I am not standing in a hallway promising that a job will be sorted after they move in. Once I am making that promise, the better applicants have usually moved on to the next viewing.

Preparing a rental property for tenants

The work that changes the outcome is small and cheap. Paint where the last tenant's furniture marked the walls, a proper clean including the oven, handles and hinges that work, the garden cut once even in February. Put a bulb in every fitting, which sounds obvious until you have done a winter viewing by torchlight. A tenant is comparing your property with the other four they saw on Saturday, most of them a similar age and layout at a similar rent. What separates them is how the tenant expects to be treated once they are in, and the state of the property on the day is the only evidence they have to go on.

Timing your works to reduce void periods

Birmingham lets in seasons. Families move between the end of June and the end of August so children start the school year settled. Student and postgraduate demand around Selly Oak and Edgbaston front-loads into July and August. Professionals move in January and again in April. The map of where they go keeps moving. Moseley Village station opened in April, and applicants have already started naming the train as the reason they are looking there, on streets where the conversation used to begin with the bus into town. If a tenancy ends in mid-August and the property needs a fortnight of work, that fortnight lands in the quietest three weeks of the year and the property waits until January for the next wave. A two week job becomes a four month void. That’s why I would agree the works schedule on the day notice is served, not when the keys come back.

The sense-check I would do

Open your own listing on your phone, at arm's length, the way a tenant would. If you had never seen the property, would you book a viewing off those images? Look for anything in shot you would move if a friend was coming round, then move it and relist.

A second opinion before the first viewing

If your property is coming back to market this year, the presentation decisions are best made before the listing goes live. We look at condition, photography, the rent the property can carry under the new rules, and demand on the specific street. It is the same check we run on every home that comes into our property management in Birmingham. If you would like me to look at a property, you can reach me on 07939 164182 or through the form below.
Stuart
Sales and Lettings Director, Miller Rose

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