Van Mildert, a major provider of referencing and insurance products to agents and landlords, will be rebranded to become Rightmove Landlord and Tenant Services next month, as part of the property portal’s new “Rent in Five” vision.
The referencing team at Van Mildert, which was acquired by Rightmove in 2019, will remain based in Newcastle.
Rightmove unveiled plans for its new ‘Rent in Five’ plan last week. The service aims to improve the lettings market for agents, landlords and tenants.
Christian Balshen, Rightmove’s head of lettings, is leading the transformation. He says that the vision involves linking every step of the journey of letting a property, from sending a lead to collecting the keys.
The five-step plan is flexible and agents can choose to use one or all of the features if it helps their business.
Balshen said: “This is a small but important step in our Rent in Five lettings journey that we announced last week. A quality reference from a brand that landlords recognise and trust is a key component in our ambition to help agents find the right tenant, faster. Our research consistently shows that the most important thing for landlords is to find the right tenant, one who pays their rent on time and who doesn’t damage their property. Referencing and Rent Guarantee Insurance both play a crucial part in this.
“By using services provided by a recognised and trusted brand, we believe we can help agents give their landlords extra confidence that they’ll find the most suitable tenant. Bringing Van Mildert’s services and tools under the Rightmove brand is a key step in our vision to improve the end-to-end experience of letting a property for agents.
“We’re building a flexible, end-to-end platform that links up the key stages of letting a property to help agents manage high volumes of leads more efficiently. Agents will be able to choose to receive pre-qualified tenancy leads, select pre-qualified tenants to book an appointment online (including CRM integration), book references in one click and automatically produce and complete all the relevant tenancy documents – all within Rightmove Plus.
“We’re here to help our letting agent customers grow their business in the most efficient way. We’ve got ambitious plans to help agents over the coming months and we’ll continue to share more updates to keep them informed of our plans. If you want to hear about our plans in more detail, feel free to drop me an email or speak to your Rightmove Account Manager.”
Rightmove asks for agent feedback after sharing its ‘new vision’
Comments (6)
“from sending a lead to collecting the keys”
Leads yes, nothing else.
Landlords use us because they have heard we are the people to use to look after their home; as such, we are not going to abdicate our responsibilities, both to the landlords and tenants, by passing it to RM.
Our USP is the direct involvement we have with our landlords and tenants, it creates a positive connection with both that helps towards a smooth tenancy. The more you remove yourself from the various elements the more you distance yourself from the very people that matter.
Rm make it sound like giving keys is nothing special, just something to handover, but it is a great deal to the tenants, being the most anticipated part of the process and provides an opportunity to cement the relationship.
As a landlord I like to choose who I use and keep some degree of control over matters rather than let some multiple control my assets. That way I can use people I KNOW to be competent and not use the mindless tick box computer decision making systems designed o maximise the multiples profits. Other may like to lose control.
I used VanMildert for 8 years it was a great company to deal with, I stopped using them when Rightmove took them over as I refuse to give Rightmove any more of my money.
Christian is a Rajeev level gentleman, that hasn’t changed. Richard’s tech is sound and was a a full 5 years ahead of its competition. They were and are a great company with a great system.
Rightmove bought Van Mildert to make Rightmove sticky with the lettings industry at the time of the tenant fee ban. This vision is workable but not as a way of retaining a client base and inflating a portal ARPA to £2500 a month. The vision isn’t wrong, the motivation and the execution is.
Renters trust the RM brand so this makes sense when asking them for a credit check.
Alto/Jupix (both ZPG) never bothered to plug in a different reference checking company after Van Mildert got bought-now it’ll be Rightmove branded!
This vision lacks specific domain understanding; the biggest issue in lettings is the volume of people who with no cost or commitment can enquire about renting a property.
If Christian is committing Rightmove to filtering out more than 30 applicants for every property offered for rent and just pass the best 10 applications forward for a viewing, great. This will not do that, it will exacerbate the problem of 30+ applicant all expecting to be able to rent properties that are massively over subscribed.
Completing assured shorthold agreements automatically is a marketing sound bite, it is not possible for a portal to do that. While the basic AST and section notices might be the same, every landlord, every property has bespoke circumstances and clauses. A portal doesn’t have the property specific detail to produce an AST and clauses and the CRM feeds do not include that level of detail
There is good reason why Van Mildert provided a small part of the lettings and management process, it’s just naive to think Rightmove can go from a property aggregating system to a lettings and property management system in the way described above.