 property family, good evening, and welcome to this Thursday installment of the private property podcast. My name is Marta Shingange and it's great being here once again as a gas presenter standing in for Zama. First things first, happy happy women's day to all the beautiful queens in our community. We continue to celebrate in Bogordo for your great contribution to shaping a property sector we can all be proud of. We are so glad that you have been enjoying and being inspired by the content we have been bringing you on our three shows this women's month. I hope you're all comfortable and ready for another insightful show. So whether you are on Facebook, which is my most familiar platform or you are a YouTuber or joining us from the glamorous streets of Instagram, welcome a special greeting to my top fan gang on Facebook. I know they wouldn't forgive me if I didn't do this. So hi guys. It's always great to interact with our family on these social media networks as we bring you great content on all things property and farming. As we do it every weekday, our awesome team comes through after this podcast at eight o'clock starting with Chad on Mondays and Fridays showcasing gorgeous homes around South Africa. The queen of farming is on Tuesdays and Thursdays looking at agriculture and farming for a dose of inspiration on how to get into and thrive in property investment. You can join you can join Esther on Wednesdays. Now before I bring in our guests for the evening, let me remind you about our awesome competition as we changed the one million follower mark. It's all too easy. You just need to comment, share our Facebook page and tag your friends and family using the following hashtags. So it's hashtag one million followers. Hashtag ten thousand comments. Hashtag five thousand shares. The battle of the fingers is on. So let's grow our our community and make the circle bigger. Details are on our Facebook page. The price, the cash price rather has rolled over since our first three winners didn't claim it on time. Tonight we will be giving away two thousand reins to one lucky fan. The winner will be selected by a random picker and announced during the show. We have to claim the price during the live show. So come on. But be the boy and call everybody Zila. Back to tonight's show as we continue to put the spotlight on ladies this women's month. Our guest for the evening is Shanice Trithaway, the CEO of Rent Master and we are discussing the reality of women buying rental property and becoming not landlords, lend ladies. So welcome to the show Shanice and happy women's month. Thank you so much for having me and same to you. Let's celebrate being who we are and bringing that power to the property sector. Awesome. Awesome. It's always great to have you on our show. Thank you. Let's get to it. Women landlords, the property market has been growing quite phenomenally phenomenally in recent years with many people and quite pleasing women coming into the market. We have shifted from being just homeowners to being investors. Personally, I am six months in the market and it's rather daunting at times I must say. So what is the environment like out there today on becoming a landlord? So as you rightfully said Martha, you know the world has changed and property ownership is not gender based anymore. It's about who is able to afford and own a property and form an idea of how they are going to create wealth for themselves and you either do it through investment, stock exchanges, your retirement funds and property certainly is a place that people are putting their money. So when we talk about where we're putting our money and what the property market out there looks like, it's certainly a competitive one and it's one where we need to know what we are working with. It's important and congratulations on you being six months in your journey. But the power is that you're not alone. Previously where we had investors that had big money, big wealth, big corporates owning property and having these digital tools, we've learned over the years that the ordinary man and woman out there can actually own property and what do we bring as organizations to them? The one property owner, the 10 property owner, what do we bring them in order to make that property journey easier? So it's about knowing your tools and knowing what to look for. Now absolutely, it's quite an exciting time I must say. I mean I wouldn't have thought about being in property a few years ago but look we're into it and it's quite exciting I must say. So you mentioned that there is a paradigm shift in the market that we're seeing. What are those indicators that you have been seeing to indicate this? So when I say that there's been a shift in the way we view property, I'm going to use a very unrelated example and just bear with me because it's very real, we're all ordinary people. So for instance I take my car for a repair and we've heard before we go there and your mechanic will go I'm sorry, I can't help you, I need an auto electrician and you okay, we need to get a specialist. I go to a doctor that deals with my heart, a cardiologist. I certainly am not asking him about my eyes because that's an eye specialist and like a bank. You know I've got my relationship banker but I've got another person behind the scenes that's monitoring risk or bond issues or my valuation for an application. What we see in a world that's filled with so much information, information that we also have access to because of the internet etc is that you have specialists in the market and property is no different. Those days where you were a person that had a property unlike a big corporate or someone that you know had a whole lot of wealth and money and capital to throw at it, what happens is that the individual now is saying I need to contract and put good practice in place and this is what we have to understand. Owning property is about what specialism are you in. Are you engaging with the right partner to procure, to buy or sell or in our case with Rentmaster to support you in successful rent collection and making sure that term of getting that rental which is your cash you banked on this in your bank. Wow that's that's quite interesting. So we now need to look at property ownership quite differently and I'm quite interested in knowing what does that mean for us as ordinary landlords. I mean after all we are in need to create second or third streams of income to grow our wealth and of course build legacies. So what does all of this mean for us? How are we supposed to be looking at property ownership differently in 2021 compared to let's say 10 years ago? So I must be honest I'm a landlord myself I'm a landlady myself I own my own property and I've been there for for a while. Admittedly I've got the benefit of working with these this information that certainly supports me reading the market and when you are property owner you need to be informed and you need to act quickly and you need to know what action to take. So when I look at what I do every day I look at what the market is doing what indicators am I using as a measuring stick for the actions I need to take and to read what my tenant may do because humans are dynamic property ownership is dependent on your tenant meeting their obligation and you perhaps have your own bond that you've got to pay. So what happens is that there's a whole pipeline of how these things have a knock-on effect and you don't want to be left with holding this big weight of it whilst you have your full-time job. Of course you need to know what to look out for and those are the indicators or the market measuring sticks that we certainly use on a daily basis. So that's quite interesting and I think we need to just go back to that so that we speak about it more in detail because I'm also quite intrigued you know sometimes you hear about these issues things being mentioned in bits and pieces but it's quite interesting that everything has got to come together so you need a structure so a structure is very important to make sure that you have your systems you know you've got your doubts on the road almost. So but now as Shanesh if we can just take a quick break because it's we are getting into the most exciting part of the show as I mentioned earlier we are running a competition to get us into one million followers on Facebook. So to everyone at home here is that most exciting part for the evening our random selector is ready and tonight's winner who is working away with 2000 rents is Drumroll. Can somebody just can someone just pump me up here. It's a pity I'm all alone but can we just have a bit of drumroll so as we wait for the for the selector to just show us who tonight's winner is our ready team and the lucky winner who's working away with 2000 rents is Nompo Melelo Lovo. Congratulations Nompo Melelo you have until the end of the show to raise your hand on the comments section in order to claim your prize congratulations and enjoy it. So if you also want to be one of the winners next time please remember to comment on our comment section engage with us share our facebook page tag everybody let's make the circle much much bigger than it is right now we want to get to one million followers. So Michelle let's get back to it you you are just talking about the indicators that companies like Rentmaster you know are sort of monetary so here I am I'm in the market I've made it I've got one or two or three properties what are your top tips in terms of what we should be monitoring the performance of the of of our investments so that we know that they're actually growing. So I use five basic indicators obviously there's always detail that you can delve into it's a thing that keeps me interested every day so I've made a I've made a career out of it so but I'm going to stick to the top five and this is what I do this is what I speak to to my clients and the and the other property owners so at a high level you're looking at interest rates right you need to know what you're prevailing interest rates and at each point I just want to remind anyone that's listening that your indicators need to come from a reliable source and they need to be consistent because you need to track them every quarter you need to give yourself time and space to see what the different trains are doing and you need to be able to compare like with like so we're looking at interest rates we look at inflation I look at inflation I look at vacancy rates in the rainfall market market demand rate in the in the property market and what the rental market has is a good standing ratio and that is a very very important indicator for me okay that's that's that's great I mean for for example I never thought about inflation I just it's just one of those things that are the least of my my you know my priorities so do you want to delve a little bit more into into into those I'm so glad you said that because I could have carried on speaking about it and I thought before I continue telling you all of this details if I'm an economics lecturer let me give you a chance to say no no no you should you should because they those are quite interesting things that are key you know you mentioned interest rates that is something that is very important before you make your next decision you obviously need to think about the interest rates you mentioned your issues of inflation that's also quite important so please I'm quite interested now let's let's let's let's go for it so let's get me excited let's you know so the thing is that when I look at all of these rates there's an interplay between them what does it mean for tenant market and what does it mean for a landlord market we look at interest rates if interest rates are going down like they are right now it means that you can grow your portfolio at a more affordable rate because you can get bonds but equally there are people out there that were renting that can become first-time homeowners so once again you've got a trade off here they can now afford their own bond when they were previously paying you rent and suddenly they're in the market so you now have an impact on your uh vacancy rate meaning now you've got fewer tenants and you've potentially got more vacant property in the market that's either been bought up by homeowners or you've got developments happening for these new time homeowners so that is interest rates and obviously you need to know that because you need to know how to budget for your bonds and how to know to meet your commitment because you certainly don't want your credit record impacted by non-payment absolutely when we talk about inflation we talk about the ability for someone to buy goods and services that purchasing power what does one ran buy you today versus tomorrow and when inflation goes up what we're saying is we need more of those one rands in order to buy the same value that we did yesterday so why is that important it's important because effectively over time that's going to impact what our interest rates do because we have to get a return on money and maybe interest rates then go up and then your bond is going to go up but as a property owner you must know goods and services are growing by inflation so your costs of maintenance are going to grow your services that you provide are going to grow in costs so if you've got a certain rental rate but growing costs what is that margin that you're looking at and you need to take into account how you're impacting your own return based on inflation very important when i look at market and just a last note on inflation it also means what are tenants disposable income if they've got to buy food and pay for education maybe they've got less disposable income for the rental rate that you're demanding when we talk about a vacancy and market demand those i would say you look at it together in the sense of they're telling you about what tenants how tenants are responding to what you've got out there how many others are you competing with so for instance you could have many tenants and you could have a low tenant demand but a high supply of property and that difference means that you've got a competitor in the area and you could have that through development through available properties because of homeowners and as i've said through affordability issues if we look at the past year where people can have had reduced incomes so now how that impacts you is how are you going to set your rental right what is the right level in order for you to meet those costs and your bond while still competing effectively with the market and for me my favorite and why it's my favorite is because we do so well at it is the good standing ratio and that is how well what tenants paying now the market is saying in a month that rent is due who's paying on time and in that month that it's due and our market generally the benchmark right now for residential property 74 percent at rent master we sitting at 95 percent hello yay and that's why that's very impressive that's impressive that's why i love it so much it's because how can you successfully collect your rent given all of these other factors and that means what strategies are you employing to successfully collect your rent and that is how i go about analyzing it all the time i think that's absolutely awesome so you are not looking at one thing in isolation i think that's what's important because i think at times we make the mistake of looking at one thing and not the other so you've got to bring all of these things together so it's quite a balancing act there you know you've got to keep your your fingers you know on the pulse at all times i mean the good standing rate that one i i wish i had heard about it when i started because i mean my mom also has a a rental property and at some point we really really struggle for for a while to get you know to get the tenant to to actually pay up so now i'm thinking you know if we had known what we know now we probably wouldn't have been sitting where we were sitting but yeah we know better right we know better now so we'll definitely do better so thank you so very much for breaking it down the way you do it into such a an understandable level i i i have i've learned quite a lot thank you so much shenice such a good thing on our comment section and we appreciate the love that you are showing us this evening please keep engaging let us know your thoughts on tonight's show you will also be increasing your chances of winning now um shenice as a new landlord or someone who is trying to get into the market what should we be doing to get started or improve how we are managing our properties so that is a fascinating question and i i do answer that quite a bit and i'm excited to say i touched on it at the beginning of our podcast and that is there was a perception before that all of these tools in order to set yourself up for success as a property owner meant that you had to have a whole lot of capital big corporates could do it banks could run debit orders big attorney firms could provide you these documents you needed to be a corporate in order to access credit reports to to credit check who you were going to contract with and the exciting thing is where we find ourselves today in the world is that all of those tools and mechanisms are available to us whether we own one property or many more and this is what is powerful this is the power of change and this is the power of partnering with the right people in order to set yourself up for success so if i was starting on a journey i would certainly want to know how do i contract properly and that is where leases that are available at a very affordable price and in rent master's world when you are a client we provide it to you for free and that is partnering in a way to make sure that you're set up to take legal action and that the rights and obligations without you having to forfeit an organ in terms of paying for it you know it costs you a kidney a leg an arm no it's affordable it's achievable it's within your reach what about vetting uh we very important means exactly know who you are dealing with and get the permission work with the individuals that understand the CPA the consumer protection act get your signature on that application form and get your credit check to know who you're dealing with meaning what is someone saying versus what is the data and evidence saying and that is how we through our strategic partnership with tpn credit bureau can provide that level of information then it comes to your ongoing monitoring as i said as specialists you know we all have our full-time jobs whether it's remote working at home trying to home school feeding our pets looking after our mom whatever it is the point about it you've got to have someone the finger on the pulse so understand that you may need to partner with someone for that rental collection so that you can act quickly and the one other powerful thing i've realized is debit order platforms you can partner with someone like rent master and get your rent by a debit order you don't need to go to a bank it's accessible to you and eft is not permission for tenants not to pay they rent on time the debit order takes away that debate yes and you are sort of absolutely awesome absolutely awesome so rental collections uh collection services like um like rent master they are your partners so you shouldn't be you actually do not have to be you know running around trying to put all of these things together they are there to make your life easy right so um i mean for me uh your services and such rental collection services they come in at a price it's a very small price uh to pay for the peace of mind that you actually get but you know there could be someone who's thinking you know it's it's it's it's it's money out of my pocket can can what value you know we've just spoken about you know it brings together all of these things and you don't have to be running around but the value for us as landlords compared to me now having to manage my own properties myself well this is the interesting thing the value of what you pay comes after you've sometimes felt the pain um of it and my job is to make sure that you never feel the pain so it's it's a it's a difficult sell because i don't want anyone to fall on bad times to realize the value but with our association you don't have those stresses so if i have a look at rental collection service for instance easy collect which is the manner of just processing your rental via debit order and if default takes place we send your letter of demand and set you on the right path to doing legal process because a letter of demand starts you towards legal cancellation um as well as in order to run the invoice the debit order you need an invoice and that obviously is your ordered trail now that type of admin is all in a very easy lease management system accessible and easy to use so for 165 rand and a free property management system free up to 20 leases and very affordable thereafter what we're saying is that you pay 165 rand i hear you but when you don't pay when the tenant doesn't pay you're calling five times a letter of demand that can cost you 75 rand never mind the time the checking on the eft logging on while logging on on banking you know your child falls off the bunk bed at my point is that we have life happening around us absolutely we don't recognize the cost of that stress in admin and equating it to 165 rand and saying no to that may be a short-term decision when we're looking at a longer term return on investment absolutely so i mean for me that's an easy sell you know the way that you have just sold it to me i i am sold yeah i'll send you that mandate it's true i mean it's a one-stop shop you've got everything you don't have to be running around um and and it's reliable it's it's done by professionals so why not i think i think there's there's more benefit than and at 165 friends i mean it sounds like it's still to me so no definitely it's it sounds like a service that you know most of us who are scared you know we we just terrible at admin or we just don't have the time and we have this partner you know working this journey with you and giving you all the professional support that you actually need so it's it's it's absolutely awesome can i thank you so very much it really has been a very insightful uh a show i have been taking a whole lot of notes um i'm quite excited about what you guys are doing and this type of service that is that is available so as we as we wrap up um i as i've indicated that we are still in women's man uh celebrating the women and now looking at women in property which is our sector what would be your quick advice to women women who want to get into the property market well property is no longer polarized to gender we have come into the economy being empowered working woman um we've been empowered in many different ways and we should use that power of empowerment to um invest in ourselves and diversify investments in properties understand who we can partner with uh and not be alone on that journey we certainly are community and in this community of property they certainly are many role models many of them female that you certainly can follow learn from and create that journey of wealth um that you aspire to absolutely i think that is a beautiful note to end our show and to that i think i will say woman let's go and get it girls we absolutely can do this that was absolutely awesome shanice thank you so very much for joining us this evening it was absolutely lovely having you once again thank you such a pleasure thank you so much for having me and you take care have a brilliant woman's man thank you so much you do the same and stay safe and uh that's a wrap for the evening family so zama will be back on your screens tomorrow evening to see you off to the weekend uh don't forget to keep on sending all of those comments share our page take your friends and family and everybody so from me it's good night milchlai seca stay safe and goodbye