One vacant flat. Hundreds of applicants. In metropolitan areas, this is everyday reality. If landlords want to give as many applicants as possible a non-discriminatory chance, mass viewings are usually the only option. Since coronavirus, that has been unthinkable. Thanks to digital letting solutions, however, there are much better alternatives.
The flood of applications that follows the publication of a vacant flat creates an enormous administrative burden for housing companies. Coordinating applications, answering a growing number of questions from prospective tenants and handling the letting process are real time-eaters.
Many landlords want to streamline the process and make it more efficient by setting up a waiting list or asking prospective tenants to register their search profile with the housing company. Unfortunately, this only helps to a limited extent. Maintaining a waiting list is labour-intensive and it is not always up to date, because housing preferences and requirements change, and the tenant may long since have found their ideal home elsewhere. Storing prospective tenants’ data is also difficult under data protection law: a lot of data may only be collected in connection with a specific flat application and must be deleted after six months at the latest.
Managing applicant data smartly: the applicant pool
Our central prospective tenant database shows that it can be done far more efficiently. It is a Germany-wide database with hundreds of thousands of prospective tenants who are actively searching. Landlords can use it to send suitable tenants a digital flat offer with just one click. Prospective tenants manage and update the data they have provided themselves. This means that, in this case, data protection is not something landlords need to worry about. There is an extra feature for housing cooperatives: a special applicant pool in which prospective tenants can only create search requests for one specific landlord. Cooperative housing companies can set up a special registration link for their members and so provide them with suitable housing.
Spot on: tenant matching
Another digital helper in this context is tenant matching. This precise qualification mechanism enables a qualitative pre-selection of flat hunters: tenant matching sorts your prospective tenants by how closely they match your desired tenant profile. This lets you see the best-matching prospective tenants at a glance, whether you have 10 or 100 of them. To protect prospective tenants, their data is revealed in a three-stage process in line with the recommendations of the Düsseldorfer Kreis (the former joint body of the German data protection authorities).
Tenant matching and the applicant pool in the feature overview
Conclusion
Especially in the exceptional year of 2020, the digital letting process has proven to be a convenient solution for housing companies. It saves time and money and is also secure under data protection law.
We compared our own company figures for the first two quarters of 2020. The prospective tenant database in particular saw a real boom: compared with the first quarter of the year, 60 per cent more flat offers were sent via the prospective tenant database in April, May and June. Some current figures from the autumn point to a worrying scenario. Housing companies that supplemented or switched their way of working digitally from the spring onwards have a clear advantage.
For everyone else, the message now is: tackle your processes, optimise them digitally and let smartly in future.