You can buy 500 credits for £60.50 (each credit buys 160 characters of text to a single recipient) by going to tools>Configure>SMS Configuration and Purchase Text Credits. Your messages will get applied immediately - the idea being that it gets you out of trouble at a weekend.

However, if you are prepared to spend more, we can reduce the price.

Here are the bundles on offer:

To buy these bundles, please fill out the form below and our Account Managers will action your request. If you are about to run out over a weekend or evening, order a 500 credit bundle in tools>Configure>SMS Configuration, tell us in an email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and we'll sort everything out at the bundle rate

How many Text Messages do I need to buy?

Text messages get straight to the recipient. No searching through email spam, little chance of missing them. Our members get great results from them. If you fully embrace text messages including getting details to hot applicants, we think you'll need about 2700 per month. 

If you just confirm appointments and send general "please call me" texts, you'll need about 500 per month

here's our assumptions behind all this:

Let's assume you send text messages to your proceedable buyers and those with a local property to sell (your potential vendors) when you take on a new instruction.

Generally, across the board, you should have 200 applicants for each property, 20% of which (40) fall into one of the proceedable categories

So, assuming 3 new instructions per week, 1 back on the market and a couple of price changes, that's 240 text messages for matching. However, unless you are very clever and very concise, you'll need 2 credits of 160 characters per message so that's 480 text credits per week - call it 2000 per month.

Then, if you send viewing confirmations, you'll need 2 credits per viewing - 20 viewings per week = 40 credits - call it 160 credits per month.

If you send the automatic "2-hours before the appointment" text message - that will be another 160 credits per month

You can also send yourself a text message reminder for each appointment - so 10 accompanied viewings, 10 valuations = 40 credits per week - 160 credits per month

Finally, you'll want to send general "please ring me" or " your rent is due" messages. 50 per week? You'll probably only need 1 credit for these - that's 200 credits per month

I get free messages with my mobile phone contract - why do you charge so much?

With text messages bundled in mobile phone contracts these days, it might seem strange that we charge you for text messages sent via Expert Agent.

The mobile phone companies pay each other about 1p per message sent. They can therefore afford to bundle lots in their average £15 per month mobile contracts - some subscribers will use the full allocation, others won't use any. So, they play a "numbers game".

Sadly, we can't just buy an "unlimited texts" SIM and use a device attached to our servers to send direct to the networks. Such devices exist - click here for details - but they wouldn't cope with our throughput. Also, the problem here for us is that "unlimited texts" isn't unlimited texts - the networks have a fair usage policy and we'd get cut off within a minutes of use.

 If anyone fancies buying one and installing it in their office, keep us in the loop - we'd love to know how you get on with it. Maybe we could write an interface to it.

So, we have to send text message through "internet gateways" to the mobile phone networks

The networks resell vast bundles of message credits to 3rd party SMS Wholesalers. If we bought from them, we'd have to build our own infrastructure and manage connections to the networks ourselves. We therefore buy from a reseller on a managed contract - they provide the infrastructure, do the software development and generally manage the whole process. We add a small profit on top of their charges and pass the cost on to you. 

So, we could sell you text messages at a cheaper rate but we'd have to employ extra developers and support people, put in extra hardware etc and then we'd have to increase our subscriptions. We think the way we do it is fair. If you use text messages, you pay for the message and the services needed to get it to its recipient. If you don't use text messages, you don't pay any extra.

The Tenant Portal is a feature that was added in early 2016.  

This page will only be active once the Applicant is added to a Pending Tenancy.  

For more information, see the Tenant Portal (Beta) section of the manual.  

Article Contents

Introduction

7 Day free trial!

Getting Started

Using Expert Agent Referencing

Any Questions?

Introduction

We've been keen to add automated tenant referencing to Expert Agent for some time. You might have seen a few survey requests from us - we wanted to know who you use and whether they are any good.

Our August 2016 upgrade represents our first "toe in the water" relating to referencing.

The surveys told us that there are over 40 referencing companies out there. We looked hard at the "top three". One got a poor star rating from you. Another didn't have any sort of automated integration available. So, that left just one - Van Mildert - and those of you that use them think they are great. 

We discovered that Van Mildert have done technical integrations with a couple of our competitors. This made an integration easy - they showed up potential shortcuts and pitfalls.

We really like their team and we like their pricing structure which doesn't penalise smaller agents.

You will need to switch it on for your Agency.  Then just set up a potential tenancy, right click, choose Referencing, add any extra information into the Van Mildert form that appears and submit the request. The applicant or applicants gets sent a text message and email with a link, a set of traffic lights in Expert Agent tell you the process of the reference and the results, when ready, are made available in the tenant record.

A standard reference is £20+VAT*. 

* the £20+VAT might be slightly more than Van Mildert's best possible "direct" rate. If price is critical (rather than having a fully automated, integrated system), please contact them direct. However if you go to them direct you'll lose the ability to automatically order without re-keying applicant data, you won't get progress update "traffic lights" and the finished reference won't get integrated into Expert Agent. 

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 7 Day free trial! 

Van Mildert are  offering a 7 day free trial. All you have to do is send through your first reference request. You can then send through up to 10 reference requests per branch within 7 days. These will be processed and no charge will be levied.

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Getting Started

1. Switch EA Referencing on for your office

You need to make sure that Expert Agent Referencing is switched on for your business.

A superuser needs to Tools ->Configuration (1 and 2 below) then choose Expert Agent MarketPlace  from Property Configuration (3 below) and then tick Expert Agent Referencing Enabled (step 4 below)

 If you don't want referencing switched on, on just reverse the steps above.

2. Switch EA Referencing on for selected staff members

A superuser then needs to switch on the referencing capability for any users that will need to do referencing. Go to Tools>Configuration>Agency Staff. Choose a staff member that you want to have access to referencing. Choose Permissions at the bottom of the staff profile form. The Permissions form opens - choose the Advanced page tab and change the referencing dropdown to Use as below.

That's all there is in terms of setup.

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Using Expert Agent Tenant Referencing

The Ordering Process

If you have switched on your users (see above), you can issue referencing requests in any tenancy record.

Choose References>EA Tenant Referencing (steps 1 and 2 below). We populate Van Mildert's form with as much info as possible. There's an option to add landlord details so that van Mildert can offer them an insurance policy but, at this stage, we've chosen to not populate this to save accidental referrals.

When ready, click OK, Order (4 above).

If it is the first time you've ordered through Van Mildert, they aim to call you to discuss their service and any optional extras.

You'll get a confirmation email from Expert Agent.

The prospective tenant(s) get an email and text message with a link to an online application form. They get nagged relentlessly till they have completed the form.

Expert Agent then displays either a red, amber or green traffic light next to each tenant in the property's tenants grid as shown below:

No light means that references have not been applied for.

Amber means that the references have been applied for.  

Red is applied for and returned with a "fail".

Green means returned and "pass"

When the completed references are returned, you'll receive an email from Expert Agent and the traffic lights change accordingly.

To review reference application progress or to download any of the Reference Reports (they will not be added to the Tenant Record, you will need to manually add them), go to the Tenancy record, Right Click -> Hover over Referencing and choose EA Tenant Referencing - the same option you used to start the reference process. You'll be logged into Van Mildert's control panel and you'll see the references that you've applied for as shown below:

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Any Questions?

You don't need to contact Van Mildert to get started - just send your first reference order request through and they'll aim to call you.

Ongoing, if Expert Agent fails to display Van Mildert's form (and you've checked no popup blockers are preventing this). Log a support ticket with us .

For other matters, please call Van Mildert direct on 019 1256 0920.

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