About Us
About PRIVATELANDLORD
PRIVATELANDLORD was started in 2005 by our Principles, Hayley and Grant Gibbons.
As young newly-weds, they back-packed through Africa in 1995 and ended up in the U.K. They were supposed to be passing through on their travels but quickly realised the opportunities presented in the property market at that time, got jobs and saved up the deposit for their 1st property within a year. They built up a sizable property portfolio after 10 years in the U.K., which they managed themselves…and then also started to be asked to manage other people’s properties.
However, the U.K. was never supposed to be home for them, so they finally returned to the Cape and with their 10 years of property investment and management experience, decided to continue doing what they love best and PRIVATELANDLORD was created.
The name PRIVATELANDLORD was decided upon due to the fact that the owners were Private Landlords themselves and the whole business concept of PRIVATELANDLORD was born out of the owner’s realization that rental agents and rental agencies are not actually Landlords….and as such quite often misunderstand the needs, the trials and the worries and concerns of the individual landlord.
The idea of PRIVATELANDLORD is that it talks directly to individual landlord’s and portrays to them that we at PRIVATELANDLORD understand the way an individual landlord thinks.
We strive to build our reputation, impressing landlords by demonstrating to them that we have their best interests at heart and understand what to do and how to protect their interests.
PRIVATELANDLORD is run by landlords - for landlords.
Our Principles are firm believers that placing the right tenant to start with is 95% of the job done – and with this factor in mind, our main focus is ensuring we place the right tenant every time…..in fact we have never had to evict a tenant placed by ourselves, yet.
Considerable effort goes into the screening of tenants and we believe that complete transparency is required when presenting a prospective tenant to a landlord – our landlord must understand every aspect of risk that may be associated with a tenant before the tenant is accepted – our reputation depends on it!
We have a dedicated screening section that provides direct feedback to the landlord, ensuring the landlord gets nothing but the hard facts regarding a potential tenant.
We have been incredibly successful in placing the right tenants…so much so that we have launched a tenant screening product that we call the TENANTCHECKER – we don’t believe anybody else offers such a useful product and are of the firm opinion that no matter what computer algorithm is created, it can never give you as accurate an analysis on a prospective tenant as one of our trained screening specialists can give you.
We also are extremely pedantic and thorough with regards to our ingoing inspections – besides a very comprehensive inspection report, our agents photograph every inch of the property – just in case an issue should arise – we take on average something like 800 plus photos per property – this means that the tricky business of damage and deposit handling at the end of the tenancy is a lot clearer (lets never say it’s easy!)
Lastly, we understand that the very last thing a landlord needs, is to have to pay attorney’s fee’s during or at the end of a tenancy – when a landlord and tenant need to get an attorney involved….the only person who is going to win….is the attorney!
We make great effort to carefully consider the costs to a landlord should they need to employ an attorney and use all of our experience and knowledge to make sure this is avoided.
PRIVATELANDLORD started out from a spare room in the Principles house and now have prominent offices in Noordhoek, Cape Town. We employ a team of highly trained individuals who love what they do and are ready to go the extra mile for you!