Why Tenants Are Like Apples

WHY TENANTS ARE LIKE APPLES, AND HOW TO PICK A GOOD ONE!

Psychologists tell us that the first emotional bond that we develop is trust. This begins at birth, as we seek out patterns of consistency to help us understand and interpret our new world. This is more than an attempt to find comfort and familiarity, it is a deep-rooted survival mechanism. Trust shapes our earliest relationships, from a basic level and it is from these formative years, with these nascent bonds, that we learn how to use trust to survive.

But how do we gauge whether we like and trust someone if we only have a very short period of time in which to do so and, further, if we are to judge someone by their actions, then how are we to do this when we haven’t met them before? The answer here is to hothouse, by creating a situation where you can gauge responses to different circumstances. Let’s look at what I mean by this, in the context of a viewing:

The first question to ask yourself is:” do I like this person?” Not “are they nice?” These two questions are subtly different, think about this for a second. When you take the time to ask yourself whether you genuinely like someone, you are engaging all your senses, including your gut instinct – which is a powerful internal warning system – ignore it at your peril! Another important question is, are they courteous? When you treat them with courtesy and invite them to do likewise, do they oblige? Create ways for them to demonstrate this. If you go to walk through a door, will they gesture for you to go first? If you leave your shoes at the front door, do they follow suit? If you drop some paperwork, will they instinctively go to pick it up for you? If you have other ways of gauging whether someone is courteous, then think of a way that you can incorporate this into a viewing situation,

How do they treat everyone? This is important, because sometimes people will treat those that they consider to be decision makers (such as you at a viewing) in a preferential manner. What you want to see, is how they treat everybody. I want to see how they treat me, my team, and other housemates. We do this by creating touchpoints. Our tenant candidates will have communicated with different team members before they even get to a viewing and our team members will make notes accordingly. Once at the viewing, they will meet a member of our lettings team and, as often as possible, they will also meet any housemates in situ.

You can often see a demonstrable change in voice tone, behaviour and body language, the moment the housemates appear, and it always makes me smile. Body language. It is fair to expect that someone might be nervous at a viewing – but know the difference between nervous and “shifty” because the latter could mean that you are being lied to:

• Do they struggle to make good eye contact? • What is their body posture like? • Do they repeat words or phrases repeatedly (like they have a prepared script)? • Do they provide too much information? • Do they touch or cover their mouth? • Do they touch or cover their throat (often signs that a topic has touched a nerve)? • Do they shuffle their feet or find it hard to stand still? • Do they answer questions by contradicting themselves? • Do they appear defensive • Has the tone in their voice changed (we tend to talk in a higher pitch when we lie)? • Do they avoid the use of the word “I”? • Do they fiddle with their hair, their watch, other? I like to get “off topic.” I will show the prospective tenant around the property, give them all the information they need, sell them on the benefits of the property and us as an agency, set our stall out as to how we will treat them and what we will expect in return, explain the referencing procedure, the contract process etc., and answer all and any questions that they might have. However, in between this process, I will sandwich some off topic questions. Simple questions, which do not take a lot of thinking about. I do this for 3 reasons: (a) to put them at ease (b) to find out what they are really like beyond a script (it’s amazing what people will tell you about themselves if you only listen) and (c) to get a baseline for all of the above, to judge the answers and reactions to my questions. If you only have 20-30 minutes in which to form an opinion, make them count. Think of all the pointers you use, in your daily life to judge courtesy, authenticity and whether you get a positive sense of someone and then add them to my suggestions above, yours may be different to mine, but you get the idea.

In the same way that it only takes one bad apple to ruin a bunch, it is the same with tenants and a happy household can become an unharmonious one in a heartbeat – make sure that you use your ears and yours eyes twice as much as your mouth at a viewing – we learn when we look and listen!