Most offices do charge landlords for internet marketing when letting rental properties. However recently when our secret fee shopper called dozens of Brisbane agents, collating information for our Brisbane Fee Update Seminar, we found a staggering 79% of agents NOT charging internet marketing fees but instead providing this as free or included.
Thankfully in all other states, we find this fee charge is common practice. However, in a lot of cases, we believe that the fee is quite low and often not enough to cover the service and value that you actually provide for landlord clients when marketing their property for a new tenant.
We see too many agents either charging nothing or a very small fee like $55. The point is, you should be able to get much higher fees and $99 for internet marketing per letting isn’t uncommon, and neither is $149, $165, or even up to $220 for marketing per letting!
The best we have seen is $320, and this agency knew how to justify their fee when surrounded by agencies that charge much less!
To get a much better internet marketing fee, you need to understand some important keys. Like charging any other fee, you need to believe that you are worth it in order to know how to justify it.
Then you will get your fee!
How to Justify Your Internet Marketing Fee
Firstly, you need to consider what the alternative would be for the landlord who wasn’t able to get their property advertised using property search websites.
The only real alternative is something most of us have left behind years ago; newspaper advertising.
Based on current trends, I think we would agree that isn’t a very good alternative!
So, using a sample script (that you should adapt to your style), this is how I teach what you can say to sell this fee to your new landlord client:
“Yes, Mr. Smith. We charge $X for internet marketing to attract the right tenant quickly to your property. However, should you not wish to go this method, then the only real alternative left is newspaper advertising.
We can run an advert that will cost $X per week to run (we would imagine this fee to be high, probably $50-$60 per advert, maybe more depending on where it is advertised) and it may take a number of weeks to rent, because we know only a very small percentage of tenants will, in fact, see this advert, because nearly all tenants look online.
Adding up the vacancy cost of lost rent, together with a much higher advertising account, it is very possible that the newspaper alternative isn’t a good one!
However, when we advertise your property online, we expose your advertisement to a number of quality sites like (naming all the sites you use). We know that 95% of seeking tenants will be actively looking right there, allowing us to rent your property quickly!
Therefore, our internet marketing fee of $X is a real bargain, especially when it is featured on X amount of property search websites!”
In part two of our article, we reveal another script that you can use when your competitors charged little to nothing for an internet marketing fee.