How to Manage Student Lettings Leads

Jan 15, 2025

The demand for student lettings is at an all-time high, standing at a staggering 1,489,110 students, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s 2023 UK Student Accommodation report.

96.4% of students require housing at some stage of their academic journey, across 74 different locations in the UK. The period 2022/23 – 2023/24 saw the strongest leap in student rental growth.

While this growth poses plenty of financial benefits for lettings agencies, it also presents challenges, with more leads to process and more lettings deals to complete – all at isolated times of year.

Here, we share the most effective things to consider in order to avoid losing student leads and start managing student lettings leads.

The challenge of managing student lettings leads

One of the key challenges student lettings present is that they can be overwhelming; they flood in in quick succession at certain times of the year.

In many major cities, properties are released around October to January, with demand quickly accelerating, putting extra pressure on lettings agents. Demand usually dies down gradually after three or four months.

Without further inspection, student lettings leads can be difficult to differentiate from regular lettings leads.

A further challenge is that it can be hard to determine which students are best qualified for specific properties, for example whether or not they have guarantors.

So how can you ensure that your student leads are managed effectively and that no lead gets lost at this busy time of year?

The key to managing student lettings leads

Communication

As with all lettings, effective communication is crucial.

Ensuring all leads are acknowledged is important and gives the best first impression of your business.

This is made possible with an efficient and coherent lead management system. Find out more about how Callwell can help you start managing student lettings leads efficiently.

Callwell also allows you to prioritise out-of-hours enquiries, sending an autoresponder by email or text, meaning no student lettings leads are slipping through the net.

Communicating within your team or across branches is just as crucial as staying in touch with leads themselves. Callwell’s Internal Messenger makes this simple.

Software

Having reliable software in place forms the foundations for efficient communication, collaboration and speed, even at the busiest times.

Choosing the most suitable digital platform means you can have one central hub to identify, organise and track the progress of each of your student lettings leads and communicate with them easily.

Callwell consolidates the student lettings leads from your website, portals and ads into one streamlined inbox, allowing your negotiators to identify, qualify, track and communicate with leads easily and with full visibility over the entire lead management process.

How Callwell can help

Our services make managing student lettings leads simple, providing you with these key features:

  • Student status verification via email or text
  • UK-based guarantor check
  • Desired move-in date
  • Solo or joint applications
  • Non-student lead filtering
  • Custom questions to qualify leads

Callwell gives negotiators the ability to instantly qualify student lettings leads, separating them from regular lettings leads and allowing you to toggle between student and standard rental enquiries whenever needed.

If you’re interested in finding out more about how Callwell can keep you on top of your student lettings leads, visit our Student Lettings page and get in touch to book an introductory call.

Enquiry alerts

Callwell Alerts allows you to notify key personnel, by email, if a lead has not been called by the local branch. The alerts are easy to setup by your company administrator.

Examples of alerts commonly used:

  • Any enquiry not called back within 1 hour - Branch manager receives email.
  • Branch managers receiving an alert if the Callwell Score below a set threshold.
  • Business owners receive an alert if the Callwell Score falls below a very low threshold.

Callwell Alerts are included as part of your Callwell Pro package.

Scheduled calls with Morning Caller

Approximately 50% of leads are received between 6pm and 9am the next morning and generally, we are at our most productive during the first 90 minutes of our working day. Which makes it even harder to call all your over-night leads before your competitor.

Callwell's Morning Caller schedules your over-night enquiries to start calling your branch at 10 minutes after your Callwell opening time and then one lead will call every 10 minutes from that point onwards.

Ensuring you and your team deal with those hard to come by leads quickly and efficiently, while maximising your ability to carry out business.

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Inbound calls and ad tracker

Callwell does a brilliant job in helping agent with lead management of their portal and web email enquiries, but what about the Phone Calls?

Callwell can also help with these.  We give you a dedicated number you can use for the portals and your own website leads.  This can be the same number or a dedicated number for each if you want to see the volumes and quality from each.  This number connects to your branch number or a mobile number if you wish.

The call shows in your Callwell Enquiry Screen in the same way as an email.  If the caller has also emailed then we can show you caller details.  Then simply answer the phone in the usual way.

From this system you can also send SMS text auto responders, follows ups and ask additional questions.

Just another helpful tool from Callwell - allowing you to make that first great impression, first time every time.

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Email integrations

Send automated messages through our integration with Mailchimp.

ROI indicator

Our ROI indicator is clever! Used on a regular basis, this feature will help you understand exactly what you are getting from the portals you use.

For example, if you upload the details of the completions last month, the amount each ‘deal’ is worth and the amount paid for the source or portal, our report will show you your ‘Return on Investment’.

Your report will be stored on Callwell and can be retrieved at any time. The report is designed to be printed as a PDF for management or board meetings (or perhaps meetings with your portal provider!).

Team insights

Callwell team insights provides you with the ability to review the individual KPIs of each staff member in real time. For each individual the Performance screen shows:

  • Callwell score: The Average Callwell Score achieved
  • Enquiries: Number of enquiries the individual has clicked to ‘claim’
  • Calls (attempted) and (successful): The total number of each type of call
  • Total call time and average call time: Total time spent on calls and the average time for each call
  • Average review score: Where reviews is switched on the average star rating for reviews received

Performance included as part of your Callwell Pro package.

Live management reporting

Live Management Reports provide you with headline statistics and ensure you never lose touch of branch activity. We will provide you with a URL link that instantly presents  the number of leads received, broken down into enquiry types.

Within seconds you can filter out your valuation numbers and check whether contact has been made. This not only highlights leads received during working hours, but will give you detail on contacts made to those out-of-hours enquiries.

Scoring and leaderboards

Real-time customer service leaderboards

Callwell Score – each lead is given 1,000 point, a point is lost during working hours for every minute a lead is not both claimed or called, only a successful call will count.

Callwell Scoring is optional and can be turned on or off. Your team can view a Callwell Score league table in real-time, at branch level and area level, leveraging their competitive nature to drive improved customer experience.

Your senior management can benchmark the overall Callwell Score against that of competitors, see Company Report. The performance of individual colleagues can be viewed, in the team insights report.

Statistics dashboard & reports

We provide real-time data analysis through Callwell's dashboard to help you manage your performance.

Missed enquiry alerts

Callwell Alerts allows you to notify key personnel, by email, if a lead has not been called by the local branch. The alerts are easy to setup by your company administrator.

Examples of alerts commonly used:

  1. Any enquiry not called back within 1 hour - Branch manager receives email.
  2. Branch managers receiving an alert if the Callwell Score below a set threshold.
  3. Business owners receive an alert if the Callwell Score falls below a very low threshold.

Email and SMS auto responders

Callwell auto responders help you stay in contact with you customers 24/7.

As soon as the customer makes an enquiry, they receive an email or text message with a message of your choice. The messages can be configured to be sent during the hours that you specify, for example, you may want a slightly different wording on the message that you send over the weekend to those during the week.

All auto responders can be branded with your logo.

Lead qualification

Callwell auto responders help you stay in contact with you customers 24/7. As soon as the customer makes an enquiry, they receive an email or text message asking them to click on a link and complete a simple form. When they click submit Callwell will update the system with the information, immediately. This feature enables you to gather the essential information you require in order to prioritise the customers you speak to.

Callwell automatically replies to a new enquiry, by SMS or email, asking predetermined questions regarding rental budget and household income, then we qualify the tenant allowing you to prioritise who to call first.

This feature is completely flexible and can sent at the times of day you choose, asking the questions that are important to your business. You can also brand the message with your logo.

Lead assign

Callwell Assign ensures to never forget which lead to give to which negotiator to follow up on and you’ll never have to print an enquiry again.

Enquiry type identified

Enquiry type & source of the lead displayed in the enquiry dashboard.

Depending upon which dropdown selections the customer has made, there are 22 definitions of enquiry type. These include Vendor, Landlord, Tenant, Viewing, First time buyers etc. All types are displayed in our easy-to -read format.

We also include the source of the lead, your own website, portals, or other advertising sources, our aim to give you full visibility on where an enquiry comes from and the type of enquiry.

Internal messenger

Callwell Messenger provides the user the ability to pass a lead, message, reminder or referral to a colleague in their office or another branch.

  • Enter the Name and Telephone number and choose the Type of the lead.

 

  • Choose the branch or users you would like the message to go to. Then add your text.

 

  • Once you click Create, the message will appear on the Callwell Enquiry screen of the branch or user you choose.

Full contact history

Recording all your call outcomes through Callwell means all your history is in one place.

Manual call back

Manual Calling enables a user to call customers using the Callwell system.

The feature is simple to use; open an enquiry and click Call Now and you’ll receive a call back from Callwell, press 1 and you’ll be in touch with your customer.

Record the outcome of your call and this will put the enquiry in your name, Call history will also update. Manual calls will come out of your allocated call minutes, and these will differ depending if you have Callwell Pro or Callwell Essentials.

All your leads in one place

Incoming customer emails, from all of the sources that you invest in, are displayed in a consistent easy-to-read format. The leads are all in one place and displayed in date and time order.

You can see at a glance the leads actioned, how they have been actioned, who’s actioned them.  If the action was via a call you can also see in Call History the call duration, and the number of times the call was attempted.

You can also see clearly the details from the original lead about the vendor or applicant, the property they were interested in and any notes that they added to the enquiry.

Instant calls

Instant Calls – if an email enquiry is sent during working hours, the Callwell system will ring your branch number, once a member of staff picks up the phone they will hear an automated message telling them the source of the lead, and the enquirers name, they are then asked to press 1 to be connected.

They then have approx. 20 seconds before the phone will ring at the applicant/vendors end, this gives you time to look at your Callwell dashboard to see all details about the enquiry.

This delivers several advantages, the phone will ring your branch seconds after the enquiry has been sent giving you a much greater chance of getting through to the person.

The speed of call will also get you in front of many other agents that don’t have this type of system, the sweet spot especially for valuation enquiries is to call back within 30 minutes or run the risk of missing out.