Vacancy is the one thing every landlord wants to avoid. An empty property means no income. And no income means paying for running costs, mortgage, council rates and other expenses out of your own pocket.

For over 45 years property owners have trusted us to manage their properties, and we pride ourselves on consistently low vacancy rates.

Even when Covid was at its peak, we were still under the average vacancy rate for Newcastle; in April, the average for the area was 2.1%, but we sat at 1.8%, ie just five properties out of 300.

Currently we have a vacancy rate of just 0.3% or looking at it another way, only one property out of every 300 is vacant.

Wonder how we keep our rates consistently so low? Well it’s a combination of things. Here are some of our secrets to low vacancy rates:

Working with tenants

A good relationship is key to property management. We always maintain good relationships with our tenants. As well as making communications open and honest, a good relationship often encourages your tenants to stay longer because they are happy with where they live.

Plus, a good relationship contributes to tenants caring for properties and treating it as their own home.

Throughout the pandemic, we worked actively with tenants to make sure that they were safe and where required and possible, negotiated with their rent to keep them long term and repay any deductions in the near future.

Proactive marketing

Normally if a tenant decides to leave, we’re able to access the property for inspections while they are living there, but life wasn’t normal during the peak of the crisis; if tenants did decide to leave at this time, we had to wait until the property was vacant before we could allow inspections.

In the pandemic, our Premium Marketing plan was more important than ever. As well as our properties having professional photography, we gave our properties the edge by adding floor plans and a Virtual Tour.

As part of our Premium Marketing plan, we also strongly recommend landlords used premium ads on both Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au; this ensures the property has maximum exposure. Yes, we realise this does cost a little more than standard listings, but if you pay an extra $200 and your property leases 2 weeks faster, we still think this is an excellent result and return on investment.

Availability

We work every day for our property owners, and work with potential tenants, showing them properties numerous times a week not just on a Saturday morning.

Low vacancy rates are just one reason why many long term investors choose us to manage their properties.

If you want to find out more about our property management services, please call us on 02 4956 9777, send us an email to: mail@newcastlepropertymanagement.com.au or call into the office if you want to know more.