This is lesson #12.
The whole Serviced Accommodation Training guide is available here.
Rent-to-rent serviced accommodation is where you take an ordinary house from an owner or a letting agent and run it as short-stay accommodation instead of letting it to a tenant.
This lesson is about where those deals actually come from.
You can buy one from a sourcer. That is a legitimate route, but you are roughly three thousand pounds down before you have earned anything, so it only makes sense when the deal genuinely stacks, and the property comes furnished and ready to go. If you want this to be a business rather than a one-off, you need a pipeline instead.
Ringing Round A Few Agents Is Where Most People Stop
Most people ring one or two agents, hear “we don’t do rent to rent, we just want a normal tenant”, and quietly decide the market is saturated.
It is not saturated. Agents say no because they don’t understand the model, not because there is nothing there.
Heidi’s fix for this is worth paying attention to. Her first calls went to ten agents in ten different parts of the country, starting in Scotland and Manchester, deliberately nowhere near home. Every call sharpened the pitch, and she worked closer to home as her confidence grew. By the time she was calling agents in her own area, a no had stopped meaning anything.
Consistency is the strategy. Everything else is detail.
Look For Landlords Who Already Have A Problem
A guaranteed rent offer means nothing to a landlord whose property is full and cash-flowing. It means everything to one who is losing money this month.
Since the Renters’ Rights Act came in, more landlords want out and cannot easily get out. Short-stay use gives both sides flexibility that a tenancy does not, because if the arrangement stops working, either party can use the break clause. That is a far easier conversation than ending a tenancy.
Five situations where your offer is the obvious answer:
A property relisted two or three times, or with the rent reduced, or the photos changed, and still going nowhere.
A long void, especially one running through what should be a busy letting period.
A landlord whose tenant has just left badly, with damage or arrears behind them.
Accidental landlords, who inherited a property or moved in with a partner and never wanted this business at all.
Landlords facing a compliance or refurbishment bill they had not budgeted for, on margins that were already tight.
One of ours came off exactly this. A landlord several hours away had bought cheap in an area the agent could not let, and the property sat empty for seven months. Seven months of lost income. We knew that area works for contractors, so it went to short-stay use and had bookings on it quickly.
Work Inside An Area You Will Actually Travel To
Heidi’s radius is forty-five minutes, and she will not go outside it unless there is already an established relationship there. Size matters too. Two, three and four beds only. No one-bedroom, nothing bigger than a four-bedroom, unless there is a specific reason.
This is the step people skip. They chase deals rather than asking whether it is the right deal, in the right place, at the right size, for them.
The Channels That Actually Repeat
A channel is only worth having if you can run it again next week without needing a burst of motivation.
Local landlord meets and networking. Probably the most important of the five. Heidi ran her own networking event, and most of her deals came from word of mouth through the relationships she built there, not from cold calling. Old-school landlords exiting the market who cannot sell are exactly who you want to meet.
Letting agents. An ongoing professional relationship, not a single cold ask. Meet them at the property rather than on the phone, and go to viewings.
Online listings, filtered for stale. Sort by longest listed, not newest, on Rightmove and OpenRent. New listings are competitive. Ones sitting past a month are not.
Your existing landlords. One arrangement running well is the best source of the next. Heidi has around five landlords with multiple properties each, and every one of those started with a single unit that went well.
Direct approaches to owners. In streets you already know perform. If a property is sitting empty, write to it.
Two of these, run properly every week, will out-produce all five run once in a burst and then abandoned. You need one agent who gives you multiple deals, or one portfolio landlord. That is all.
Why Agents Say No, And What Changes It
It is rarely that they have never heard of rent-to-rent. It is one of three things.
They fear a bad sublet. There is enough in the news and on social media about bad rent to renters that they assume the worst. Answer it with evidence rather than reassurance. Contracts written up properly, reviews, before and after photographs, a real website, redress scheme membership, a clean payment record. If this is your first deal and you have none of that yet, partner with someone who does, or get a mentor whose track record you can point to.
They fear losing their fee. This is the one that quietly kills most deals, and it is the easiest to solve. Two structures work. You can pay the guaranteed rent to the agent. They take their percentage and pass the rest to the landlord, exactly as they would with a tenant. Their fee is untouched, so they have no reason to block you. The trade-off is that maintenance goes through them, and you never build a direct relationship with the owner. Or the agent introduces you, you deal with the landlord directly, and the agent takes a tenant find fee. That fee can come from you, from the landlord, or from both.
They have been burned before. These are the hardest to turn around, and sometimes they are not worth the effort. If you want to try, it is the same answer as the first objection, only you need more of it. Show them the paperwork, show them the finished properties, show them you have never missed a payment.
From Nought To One Is The Hardest Part
Everything gets easier after the first deal, and it gets easier for a specific reason.
Once you have one, you have proof. Before-and-after photographs for your website and socials. A brochure you can send to the next landlord showing the property you took on, the rent you pay, the repairs you did, and what it looks like now. Convincing landlord number two is a completely different conversation to convincing landlord number one.
Until then, you have nothing but consistency. Ring the agents, go to the viewings, go to the events, send the letters, every week, until it happens. Heidi didn’t get her first deal for six months, and the thing that slowed her down was spreading her actions across too many strategies at once. Pick one and work it.
Build A Rhythm, Not A Campaign
The reason most people fail at this is not that they cannot find units. It is that they source in bursts. A hard week of calls, then nothing for a month, then starting again from cold with every relationship gone stale.
Block time and treat it as non-negotiable. Two hours a day if you can, two hours a week if you cannot. Keeping it in the same slot helps, though it matters less than actually doing it. If you can only manage one action a day, do one action a day.
Those are the channels and the objections.
What follows is the routine we run each week, and the deals that came out of it.
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