Landlord Brief- July 2021

At Century21 Novocastrian we like to keep your landlords up to date digitally. No boring old newsletters that no one reads. Casey Healey Director at Century 21 Novocastrian presents:

✅ Results for the month

✅ Updated COVID in the office

✅ Contactless Move-in

Transcript:

Hi there, Casey Healy, Director here at Century 21 Novocastrian, back with you for our landlord brief for our July end of month. Just quickly, what have we implemented this month is our contactless move in. Now what we're doing is being prepared that if we do go back into lockdown and if we can't open our office, we can still lease properties and ensure you're making a return on your property. So we've done this for a while now, but we have our electronic lease. So all lease is assigned electronically. We have our paperless condition report, which means it's served electronically. The tenants complete it through iPad, tablet, phone, whatever works for them. They can take additional photos with anything they don't agree. It uploads those photos to the report and they add their comments, and that also comes back to us electronically. We have a video presentation for our tenant onboarding, so it's more of an educational video on what their responsibilities are as a tenant, what we expect as an agency, and how we do business. And we also have our locked box entry, so when we're completing our condition report the majority of the keys to the property will be locked inside the property, and then in the lockbox there'll be just one key. That lockbox code will be sent to them the morning of move in, so that they can access the property from 9:00 AM. In relation to numbers, numbers are down a little bit, we haven't seen as many tenants vacating. We have only least 17 properties this month. Up until yesterday, we only had one property for lease. Yesterday afternoon there are a couple come on, we've got a couple of new properties at Farley, Dual Keys up there, and one at Fern Bay come on. So I think at the moment we've got four properties or five properties for lease, but four of those were only listed yesterday afternoon. So, leasing 17 properties leased, it's down about 30% on what we'd usually lease this time of year. Enquiries, we received 796, that's comparative compared to the properties leased. So enquiry levels haven't dropped as much. App's received 318, but our average days on market has crept slightly and that's an 8.9 days. So we saw it sitting mainly around the 6 to 7 day mark, so it has crept up a little bit there. COVID, where are we at? At this stage we have no tenants affected by COVID-19 here in Newcastle, which is great. If something changes, we will be sure to let you know. We do have our COVID procedures in place from last time around. Tenants will have to make application if they are affected by COVID. They do have to provide a proof of at least a 25% loss of income, as a household, so everyone living at that property has to share their combined income and we have to show that they've lost 25%. And for landlords, you are asked to negotiate with your tenant rental payments and payment deferrals, changes to rent per week, and there is $1,500 available through government funding for you to apply for, and that does need to be directly contributed to the tenants. Whether you do that over a weekly, a monthly, or a lump sum payment to the tenants, that is available there. We still have 98% of our tenants paying on time and our arrears is minimal, for 600 tenants it's sitting today at $2,700, so nothing to be concerned about at this stage, but if anything does change, we will let you know. We are still completing open house inspections. We're still doing out periodical inspections. We're obviously just adhering to social distancing measures, wearing our beautiful mask that we all love, and ensuring our team's safe, your property is safe, and our tenants are safe as well. If you have any questions, if I can be in help in any way, please don't hesitate to reach out. I'm Casey Healy, Director here at Century 21 Novocastrian. I'll talk to you next month, bye.