Welcome to the first ever “Landlords’ Barometer” – an insight into what is trending for landlords and how you can use this to benefit your business.

Property Tribes is the UK’s leading and most influential landlord and property investor community.We have over 11,000 threads and 113,000 posts … and increasing daily! The site attracts around 2,000 unique visitors per day, and we achieve between 17,000 and 20,000 page views per day.

Property Tribes can be likened to a pond filled with your ideal type of fish (clients) as it has a large audience of the 1.5 million landlords in the U.K. who are increasingly using it as a resource to find answers to problems, source products and services, and accelerate their success through learning and networking.

Knowing what is on your customer’s mind can help you improve your customer experience, provide marketing and social content inspiration, and guide you as how to best serve your customer.

Here are this week’s highlights:

1. “Being a landlord is more stressful than ever, new survey claims”

Some 25% of landlords have found being a landlord more stressful than they had expected and 67% said they were more stressed than 12 months ago.

The survey showed that 53% of landlords use up to 20% of their annual leave sorting out issues with their properties. Also 46% of landlords spent up to 20 hours a year on phone calls, negotiating with agents and tenants as well as sorting maintenance issues. Other contributing factors included late rent payments (58%), funding property maintenance and repairs (40%) and tax worries (38%).

Know your customer:

i. This information and the ensuing discussion can help you understand landlords’ concerns and use this information to improve your customer experience, as well as using it to frame marketing and social content around.

ii. Join the discussion and share how your product and service (without being too sales-y) can help landlords have a less stressful landlord life.

2. Next steps to running property as a business

This thread discusses the frustration of not being able to build a portfolio more quickly and the on-going discussion has inspirational hints and tips for any business.

Know your customer:

i. Understanding the concerns and worries of landlords can help you improve your customer experience and provide solutions to problems such as providing a portfolio review, advising landlords when a rent increase may be appropriate etc.

ii. You may learn something from this discussion that could help and inspire your own business activities!

3. Regulation of the private rented sector – Industry Up-date

This thread is a round-up of all private rented sector regulation that is happening now or in the pipeline.

Know your customer:

i. Understanding landlords’ reactions to this will help you craft your customer experience and advise your landlords prospects on the impact of regulation and how you can take away some of the strain.

ii. Use the information to up-date yourself and remain complaint.

Bonus:

4. Mandatory redress kicked in on October 1, 2014

A round up of everything you need to know about mandatory redress for lettings agents, including landlord perspectives, penalties for non-compliance, and industry reactions.

Thank you for reading the Landlords’ Barometer and I will leave you with the thought that, thanks to the amount of information available for free on the social web, ignorance is now a choice.