That turned out to be harder than she expected. “I couldn’t get a good letting agent in that area for love nor money,” says Linda. “And the more I looked into it, the more I thought ‘I’m really interested in doing this myself’. So I decided to retrain as an agent, and in 2015 I bought a small portfolio of 14 houses and built it up from there.”
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An unexpected bonus
Four years later, in 2019, The Property Booth was preparing for its biggest investment yet. The head of another independent local agency was leaving the property sector and agreed to sell his lettings business to Linda – more than doubling the size of her portfolio overnight. And as she explains, that wasn’t the only thing she got out of the deal.
“My colleague Dawn worked for him and now she works for me, and she’s just excellent at her job. And then the other brilliant thing was PayProp.”
Linda had looked into PayProp before, but a conversation with the outgoing agency owner, who used it to manage his own portfolio, convinced her PayProp was the right technology platform for her growing agency.
"I asked about PayProp and he was singing its praises. He said it frees up so much time. It’s made things more accurate. It’s so seamless and intuitive in the way it works." Linda Booth, Managing Director
Maintenance mastered
When clients join PayProp, they aren’t just getting an award-winning rental payment processing platform. They’re also forming a partnership with an innovative PropTech company that regularly adds exciting new features.
Since Linda signed up in 2019, PayProp has rolled out the PayProp Owner app for landlords to monitor the financial health of their properties; a Tenant portal allowing tenants to view invoices and make fast online rent payments; a fully documented API allowing for easy integration with in-house tech; a management reports feature that lets agents view their data in new ways and benchmark their rents against local averages; and a complete platform redesign delivering greater speed and accessibility.
But the most impactful for Linda and her team has been the maintenance hub, which launched in September 2022.
“The timing was just spot-on,” says Linda. As she explains, the property management software that she had used previously was being replaced with a new version, and she wasn’t impressed – it still had all the same issues. “We had a little training session with the software company to see how it might work, and it was almost identical – clunky and clumsy. Too much stuff going on. Then I looked at PayProp, and it was simple and straightforward.”
PayProp’s maintenance feature gives letting agents a clear overview of their active and resolved maintenance tickets right on their PayProp dashboard. Repair invoices and payments to contractors can be added to tickets, and agents can reply to repair requests directly through PayProp – with automated e-mails to users and tenants whenever a ticket is submitted or replied to.
It’s not just the user experience that Linda enjoys either. PayProp’s maintenance hub also helps her team to close tickets and keep the landlords and tenants happy with timely responses to their maintenance needs. The Property Booth has a team of just four, so it’s essential that any one of them can pick up a maintenance issue where the others left off. Luckily, the maintenance hub makes that easy. As she explains:
"Rather than sticking a Post-it on someone’s desk for the next time she’s in, I’ll just put the note on PayProp and then we can all see it. I can see on the tickets who set it up, what the next step is, when we need to follow up, and I can chase up if necessary." Linda Booth, Managing Director
Having an automatic, indelible record of tickets, communications and transactions helps her to work with tenants more effectively as well.
“When a tenant calls me and says, ‘that last contractor who came was hopeless, please don’t send him again’, I know exactly where to go to find out who we used and how much they charged.”
Core features
As streamlined and user-friendly as PayProp’s maintenance feature is, it’s also not the only selling point for letting agents. Agents love PayProp for its bank-grade security, administrative time savings and peace of mind, delivered by its unique bank-integrated rental payment processing – and Linda is no exception. For her, the fact that PayProp automatically matches incoming rents to the right tenant and landlord, and ensures that no-one is ever paid with someone else’s money, is priceless.
"I come from a compliance background and it’s extremely important to me that I do all these things correctly. It used to keep me awake at night. With PayProp, I don’t need to spend my time and emotional effort because I know it’s right, because I have a tool that’s doing it for me. It’s a jewel in the crown, really, it’s been brilliant." Linda Booth, Managing Director
And on top of helping her sleep better at night, it’s also helped her manage her business while enjoying some well-earned rest and relaxation away from the office.
"PayProp is brilliant to use wherever I am. I can do it online by a pool on holiday in Turkey – I actually did that in 2019. And the functionality doesn’t diminish wherever you are." Linda Booth, Managing Director
