Chapter 8

Conclusion: The Complete Guide to Finding Tenants

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The Complete Guide to Rental Listings

Landlord Jorney graphic

After reading our guide on finding tenants, you understand the process of creating an attention-grabbing listing, managing tenant interest, and impressing prospective tenants as you show your unit.

While it’s important to generate interest, it’s equally important to pay close attention as you get to know prospective tenants. Will they be responsible tenants who pay rent and won’t damage your property? We want to help you find, screen, and keep great tenants to make your job as a landlord as easy as possible. To go over what we’ve covered, here are the five main ideas we covered.

1.  Online Rental Listings Are Informative

Renters are tech savvy and love the convenience of searching online. To take full advantage of this trend, it’s key to list your unit on sites like Trulia, and Hotpads. With Avail, you can create one listing that is posted across all of these sites:

  • Trulia
  • Hotpads
  • PadMapper
  • Apartments.com
  • Lovely
  • Apartable
  • Apartment List
  • Zumper

Your online listings should be posted 60 days prior to move-in day. In addition to posting your property online, you should consider creating a homepage for your rental properties. Whether you have one unit or several properties, a homepage highlights your space in a professional and unique way.

Your listing and homepage should be posted on your social media. Tapping into your network is a great way to increase your listing’s visibility.

2. Online Rental Listings Are Easy to Create

The three main components to master are the rental listing title, rental listing description, and rental listing photos. When it comes to writing a title and description, our magic formula for writing a rental listing title and our magic formula for writing a rental listing description simplify the process of creating a listing. There’s no guesswork involved if you follow our guide.

The title should include the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, what type of unit it is (apartment, condo, duplex), the neighborhood, rent price, and two features.

For the description, you want to be extremely informative. Reiterate important aspects of the listing, like price, but also include cool features and amenities (hardwood floors or skyline views). List nearby attractions, transportation, or entertainment. Include important details: the security deposit amount, what utilities are included, pet rules, your credit and background check requirement, and your contact information.

The third component of creating a listing is taking stunning photos. All you need is your smart phone, a clean and staged space, good lighting, and photo editing. Make sure to photograph all spaces that are available to the tenant (every room, common spaces, laundry room, and outdoor spaces).

You can edit your photos by cropping them to take away any distracting extra spaces, make the photos brighter, and deleting blurry photos. Remember, high quality photos justify a higher rent price. In other words, it’s worth taking the time to photograph great photos and edit them to perfection because it could increase your profits.

3. Your Rent Price Influences Tenant Interest

Tenants will judge your listing based off rent price. Is it affordable? Does the price make sense in the neighborhood? Does the price fairly reflect the value provided in the unit? To set a rent price that is fair, we recommend researching your market.

Another factor that influences rent price is seasonality. Prices are highest in the summer due to higher demand for available rental properties. To take advantage of high summer prices, we recommend aiming for a summer vacancy cycle. You can do this by renewing a current rental agreement until the summer or signing a rental agreement so it ends in the summer.

Price reflects value, meaning the more valuable your unit is (renovated, fresh paint, updated appliances) the higher your rent price can be.

Rent price is also primarily a factor of supply and demand. High demand for rental properties indicates rent prices will go up. High supply of rental properties indicates that rent prices will go down. The same is true in the opposite direction.

Highly appealing listings rent at higher prices, so be sure to list online and use great photos. Rent price affects the bottom line of your rental investment.

4. Listings Help Generate Tenant Leads

By including your requirements in your listing (credit and background check, $45 application fee, etc), you are already generating serious tenant interest. The more informative and professional your listing is, the more it will attract quality tenants. Once tenants reach out to you, we recommend following up with a phone call so you can ask important questions. For instance, if they’re willing to consent to the tenant background check, what their income is, why they’re moving, and lifestyle questions.

In terms of handling tenant communication, it’s helpful to have a separate email address and to use a Google voice phone number. This allows you to organize communication and separate it from personal affairs. As you communicate with tenants, remember to be fair and consistent in all your communications to comply with Fair Housing Law. Your questions and protocol should remain standard no matter who you are talking to.

5. Rental Property Showings Help You Meet Tenants

Showings are all about impressions: making a great impression as a helpful landlord, showing off your space, and crafting an impression of your prospective tenant(s).

To prepare for your showing, be sure to clean and stage your unit. If you have current tenants in the unit, you can motivate them to clean by giving them a rent discount or by scheduling a cleaning service. If your unit is empty, you can stage it with furniture. Furnished apartments look bigger and help tenants imagine the space as their home.

Show up prepared to answer tenants’ questions. They will likely ask about what’s included in the price, how maintenance will be handled, and what is nearby.

The showing is your opportunity to get to know the prospective tenant better. You should ask questions and watch out for red flags before moving forward. Some common red flags are disrespect, unfair negotiations, and disheveled belongings or appearance.

Assuming your prospective tenants love your unit and no red flags emerge, then go ahead and ask them to apply.

Screen Your Tenants With Avail

Tenant screening is a specific process, but here at Avail, we also like to think of screening tenants as a mentality that never ends. From the moment a tenant reaches out, you are screening for manners and listening to their responses to key questions. And once a tenant is living in your unit and paying rent, you are screening them in regards to offering a renewal.

With this mentality, it’s important to think of screening tenants throughout the process of finding tenants. Even how you create your listing (where you list and what details you include) helps you screen tenants. Your clear requirements and informative rental listing are the starting points of great tenant screening.

The next step is asking your best tenant leads to fill out a rental application and to authorize a credit and background check. Stay tuned for our upcoming Guide to Tenant Screening for more detailed information.