Sales Fatigue Kicks in Otherwise
HMOs – Handling the Sales Process
You decided to sell your HMO
What do you do next?
You can’t go and tell the tenants over a coffee and cake and expect a positive reaction – especially if you don’t self-manage and have a close relationship with the occupiers.
First of all, you need to get the HMO valued.
Then you need to show some potential buyers round.
A surveyor.
Maybe another buyer visit to double check something.
Maybe the council’s licensing team or someone to do some niggley maintenance.
That’s about 6 or 7 visit requests at this point (at least) and your tenants are starting to get annoyed.
What really irritates them is if a for sale board from a local estate agent suddenly appears in their small front yard.
Tenants associate this with losing their room, their home.
Estate agents sell to homeowners and homeowners don’t want Pavel, Julie, John, Mohammed and Leah fighting over the second shared loo in the morning, do they?
It doesn’t really matter if the estate agent is hoping to sell to another HMO landlord, the fear will be done and the house harmony and gossip mill will have been started.
So, no for sale board – that’s a good start…
Choosing the right time to involve your tenants in the process is also key. Too much information and they start to feel empowered to dictate the process too much, too little and, quite rightly, they’ll feel lied to and like their contentment doesn’t matter.
You can usually pass off the first few viewing requests as ‘non sale related’.
These are ‘EPC assessors’, ‘refinance appraisals’ or ‘licensing requirements’ – all fairly tenant friendly and believable.
Definitely involve the tenants at some point after this initial point, though.
How you choose to do this will be determined by the tenants and their relationship with you and the managing agent.
I’ve always found it best practice to explain to them that you are selling to another landlord and the current management structure is remaining in place and that their tenancies and happiness are paramount to the sale being successful.
Say that you’ve not chosen to sell via a standard estate agent because you were worried about them showing families round or doing too many viewings.
As I’ve said many times before, try and keep the access requests throughout the whole process to as close to 5 as you can.
Sales fatigue kicks in otherwise.
