How to get your first landlord client

Your first landlord client is worth more than the job you do for him. He owns three flats, he knows four other landlords at the same pub table, and he has a letting agent who is fed up with the spark they are using now. One good EICR and a report emailed the same night, and you have a foot in a market that reorders every single year.

Getting that first landlord client is the hard bit. After the first one you have a reference, a schedule of rates and a story to tell. Before it, you are a stranger asking for compliance work, which is why most electricians give up after a few unanswered emails and go back to waiting for the phone. Here is how to do it properly.

Know what a landlord is actually worried about

A homeowner worries about mess and being ripped off. A landlord worries about two things: getting fined, and getting a phone call from a tenant. Rental property has to have an EICR every five years or at change of tenancy, remedials done inside 28 days, and paperwork that stands up when the council or the insurer asks for it.

That means you are not selling electrical work at all. You are selling a landlord an afternoon where none of that is his problem. Talk about the fine, the 28 days and the tenant, and he will listen. Talk about your 18th edition and he will glaze over, because he assumes that already.

Where the first one usually comes from

Not from a cold email to a national agency. Almost every electrician I have watched break into this work got the first client from somebody they already knew. Have a proper look at your own list before you spend a penny on advertising.

• Past domestic customers. Go through the last two years of invoices. A fair few of them own a second property, or their mum’s old house is rented out now. Nobody has ever asked them.
• Small independent agents on your patch. Two or three offices, twenty to a hundred doors, a property manager who answers her own phone. Those are winnable. The big managed chains take months and a supplier onboarding pack.
• Other trades. The plumber and the gas engineer doing landlord work are already in those houses every year and are asked for an electrician regularly. One coffee is cheaper than any advert.
• The houses themselves. You can see which streets near you are rented. A letter addressed to the owner, not “the occupier”, about EICR dates and the 28 day rule gets read more often than you would think.

What to say when you get in front of one

Keep it short and make it about his risk, not your services. Something like this, in your own words:

“I do the electrical side for a few landlords locally. If your EICRs are more than four years old or you have got a change of tenancy coming, I can test, write the report the same day, and give you a fixed price for anything that needs sorting so you are not sat waiting on the 28 days. Do you know when yours were last done?”

Then stop talking. The question does the work. Half of them do not know the dates, which is exactly the gap you want to be standing in.

Make it embarrassingly easy to use you

The reason landlords and agents stay with an average electrician for years is not loyalty. It is that changing is a hassle. So be the easy option from the first job.

Only one of those five lines is about electrics. That is the whole point. An organised electrician beats a better one who is chaotic, every time, in this market.

Price it as a proper job, not a favour

Landlord work repeats, so a lot of sparks knock money off to win the first one and then carry that number for years across every property the man owns. Do not start there. A repeat customer is worth more to you than to him, but volume you have not got yet is not a reason to discount today.

If you want to give him something, give him value instead of money off: the tenant call handled, the remedials priced on the spot, the reminder when the five years is up, a same day report. Those cost you organisation rather than profit, and they are the reasons he will keep ringing.

Rough example, purely to show how the sum works rather than a figure to copy. If your overheads and the wage you want come to around £5,600 a month, and you honestly bill 70 hours once quoting, certs, driving and paperwork are taken out, the back office figure you are working from is £80 an hour before any profit or van fund. The landlord never hears an hourly rate. He hears a minimum charge for coming out and a price for the job.

Work out your own numbers rather than borrowing mine. The free Minimum Charge Calculator does it in about ten minutes, and most electricians who run it find their real minimum charge sits well above the £65 to £75 they have been sitting on for years, and costs are pushing it up again every quarter. Know that figure before you agree a schedule of rates, because a rate you agree once will be quoted back at you for years.

Turn one landlord into five

The first client is the door. What you do in the next fortnight decides whether anything else comes through it.

Ask him on the day how many properties he has, and when the rest were last tested. Ask, at the point he is happiest, which is when you hand over a clean report, whether he knows another landlord who could do with the same. Ask his agent, if he uses one, who looks after their electrics. Then put his next EICR date in a diary you actually look at and ring him a month before it, because being the person who remembers is how you keep this work without competing for it.

That is the S.P.A.R.K.S. Blueprint in miniature. Specialise on a customer worth having, position yourself as the safe pair of hands, then keep in touch so nobody else gets a look in. It is what we work on inside My Electricians ToolBox with around 300 other electricians. Membership is £127, and it is currently £97 a month if you fancy a look.

So go and get your invoices out: which of your existing customers already owns a property you have never asked about?