What does your Landlord demographic look like?
Customer service and customer care - two phrases that are extremely important to the business owner. These two fundamental elements that define a business and if you lose sight of the importance of the customer, they will go elsewhere.
Competition in any industry is tough and in an age when the customer can jump straight on to social media and declare their disappointment, sometimes unwarranted, it’s easy for customers to go elsewhere.
So why it is important to focus on the customer, not just in terms of what the customer needs, but their journey and expectations? Do we know know enough about what that means?
It’s crucial to know your “customer demographic”, something organisations - private and public spend vast sums of money researching. They profile what this person or group of people “look like”. Not in the physical sense, more so in terms of behaviours. What kind of job do they have, do they drink, do they like a particular kind of coffee or biscuit? Cookies, not the edible kind, track consumer behaviours so that businesses can “target” the consumer based on their internet searches.
However, whilst PropTech is sophisticated, it doesn’t quite “profile” in that way. It matches people to property types, but it doesn’t match landlords/investors to letting agents. The landlord comes in different guises and therefore, the square peg definitely doesn’t fit in the round, and as such, different landlords have different expectations.
Protection for Commercial Tenants under Review
The Government is containing with it’s plans to extend protection for commercial tenants and has indicated that it will introduce a new ring-fencing and arbitration scheme. The new legislation to deal with the commercial rent arrears which have built up as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The legislation is expected to be introduced before the end of the moratorium on forfeiture proceedings for non-payment of rent (25 March 2022).
The government has put forward the following proposals:-
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To ringfence commercial rent arrears that built up since March 2020 (due to business closures), until restrictions for their sector were lifted. Once the arrears are ringfenced, landlords will not be able to forfeit the lease for non-payment of these arrears or take insolvency proceedings against the tenant for this debt.
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To encourage landlords and tenants to negotiate in good faith and reach a solution where possible, using the principles set out in the revised Code of Practice (referred to below).
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Landlords are expected to “share the financial burden with tenants” and “defer or waive entirely an appropriate proportion” of those ringfenced arrears.
COP 26 starts in Glasgow
What is Cop 26 ?
The Cop, or conference of the parties, is the overall decision-making body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This is its 26th annual meeting, where decisions are made by 197 countries to prevent “dangerous” human interference with the climate.
The conference officially started on Sunday 31st October 2021 and is scheduled to finish on November 12.
The conference will be held at the Scottish Event Campus in Glasgow.
In 2019, Glasgow city council set their target of becoming a carbon neutral city by 2030. The city was awarded the status of a “global green city” by the Global Forum on Human Settlements last year.
Adopted at Cop21 in 2015, the most significant conference in recent years, the Paris agreement is a legally binding treaty on climate change in which countries are supposed to increase their efforts every five years and submit new targets to keep global temperatures “well below” 2.0C above pre-industrial levels and “endeavour to limit” heating to 1.5C.
With leaders and dignitaries from almost 200 countries attending, Cop26 is effectively acting as a deadline to secure tougher targets from countries that have not already submitted them and fulfil the aims of the Paris agreement.
Daylight Saving Time (DST) - Clocks Move Back - 31st October 2021
Daylight saving time 2021 in United Kingdom began at 01:00 on Sunday, 28 March and ends at 02:00 on Sunday, 31 October 2021.
British Summer Time, also known as Daylight Saving Time, was the idea of a builder from Kent called William Willett. Apparently, on his way home from riding his horse in Petts Wood in the early 1900s, he noticed many of the blinds and curtains in the neighbouring houses were still drawn, even though it was light. This led him to consider the idea of adapting the time to better fit daylight hours. Back then the clocks were set all year round to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), meaning it was light by 3am and dark around 9pm in the summer.
Although he was not the first person to come up with this idea, he was definitely the most determined, using his own resources to finance a pamphlet outlining his idea for adapting to daylight hours during the summer. His original proposal was for the clocks to be put forward by 80 minutes in total, in four steps of 20 minutes each Sunday at 2am during April and turned back in the same way in September. He argued that this would mean longer daylight hours for recreation, improving health and also saving the country money in lighting costs. Which in this day and age, really does make sense.