More by Alana Stramowski at Avail

The Importance of Maintaining Your Rental Property

Alana Stramowski — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 21:12:53 +0000

Property maintenance is crucial to preserving the value of the physical building you own. As it turns out, it’s also an essential part of keeping good tenants.

When we asked tenants who weren’t planning to renew their leases their reasons for moving on, the second most common answer was that the property wasn’t well maintained (see Figure 1), accounting for 12% of tenants’ decisions to not renew.

Source: Study conducted by Avail surveying 1,100+ tenants renting properties in the U.S. (2019)

It’s no wonder: A well-maintained property can yield lower utility bills, which can help you keep good tenants once you find them. The reverse is true for a poorly-maintained property, which can yield unnecessarily high utility bills that can frustrate any tenant (and especially those making a good-faith effort to take care of your space).

Property maintenance is fully within your control as a landlord, which means it’s both good news and bad news that it’s a major reason tenants choose not to renew their leases. On the one hand, maintaining your property better is an easy way to improve your vacancy rates if you’re currently struggling to fill units.

On the other hand, it’s disheartening to see this so high on the list. If you own a property as an investment, it doesn’t make sense to let it fall into disrepair. That’s doubly true when you consider that, as part of business operating expenses, repairs and maintenance are tax-deductible.

Still, maintaining a property can be complicated without the right system. Using property management software that includes a ticketing system for tracking maintenance requests can make life easier for both you and your tenants.

Avail includes maintenance ticketing, which works like this:

Tenants create a ticket when damages happen. They can attach images and include notes.
Landlords get an email notification as soon as the ticket is submitted.
Landlords and tenants can communicate via messaging about plans for repairs.
Landlords can close the ticket when the repair has been completed.

Having a ticketing system offers several benefits:

Excellent records of your maintenance at tax time.
Greater clarity about how to report issues, which translates to a greater likelihood that they get reported early (when repairs are likely to be less costly).
A digital trail to help you track repeated problems and let you know when it’s time to replace or upgrade various amenities.

Whatever ticketing system you use, though, the important thing to remember is that maintaining your property is essential to retaining good tenants.

Learn More From This Guide

The post The Importance of Maintaining Your Rental Property appeared first on Avail.

7 Tips for Marketing Your Rental Property on Social Media

Alana Stramowski — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 22:47:21 +0000

You’ve taken photos of your property and written descriptions. You’ve put them together to create beautiful property listings and have posted those listings on relevant real estate listing sites. But you really want your units filled, so you’re looking for other rental property marketing ideas — like social media.

In the past, we’ve written about the importance of sharing your property listings on social media. But you can do a lot more on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat than merely share available units. And if you do that strategically, you may make it easier to fill vacant units in the future.

Here, we’ll offer seven rental property marketing ideas for social media that go beyond sharing your listings.

Before You Start: Know Your Audience

Before we get into our specific marketing ideas, it’s worth digging into the numbers a little: Who exactly is using social media? According to the Pew Research Center, 72% of American adults use social media of some kind. The most popular platforms are YouTube, with 73% of adults using it, followed by Facebook (69%) and Instagram (37%).

What’s more, those least likely to use social media are also those with the lowest income: While only 68% of Americans earning less than $30,000 per year use social media regularly, 83% of those earning between $50,000 and $75,000 are regular users and those earning more than $75,000 have a 78% usage rate.

Finally, Pew data shows that most social media users are daily users: 74% of Facebook users check the site daily, as do 63% of Instagrammers and 61% of Snapchat users.

Taken together, this means social media is a great place to reach an engaged group of potential renters with steady income. So what are some marketing tactics that will get your rental property in front of your next favorite renter? Start with these seven ideas.

7 Tips to Successfully Market Your Rental Property on Social Media

1. Make a Social Sharing Plan

You wouldn’t start renovating a unit without scoping out what you want the final product to look like, and you shouldn’t start a social media marketing campaign without identifying what you want to get out of it.

Common goals for social media campaigns include these:

Increased awareness
Increased followers
Increased engagement with your posts
Increased conversions (i.e., rental applications)

The goals you set will determine which of these marketing ideas make the most sense. Keep in mind, though, that if you’re new to social media (or new to using social media for your properties), you might want to start small, with the goal of increasing awareness about your rental units and growing your base of followers.

2. Make Your Contact Info Easy to Find on Your Profile

Before you start posting about available units, be sure to take a minute or so to update your contact information in your profile. Facebook’s business pages offer options for listing a business phone number, email, physical address, and operating hours. List information strategically: how do you want people to get in touch with you if they see something they like on your page?

While this is by no means a new marketing idea, it’s essential for if you want your social media marketing efforts to eventually translate to new tenants in your rental property.

3. List Available Properties on Facebook Marketplace

In 2016, Facebook added a feature called Marketplace that lets people sell to their social network. As a landlord, you can also post properties available for rent. Think of this as a supplement to listing your properties on real estate sites like Realtor.com®.

While only 2% of renters use Facebook specifically for finding new rentals, a casual browser who comes across a property they like (or think a friend might like) can easily share a Marketplace listing with a potential tenant.

Marketplace rental listings also come with a “Contact” button that lets potential tenants contact you with a click.

4. Post About Your Amenities

There’s more to marketing a rental property on social media than listing the property itself, of course. If you’re hoping to connect with potential renters, post about the amenities that are most important to your target audience.

Not sure what those amenities are? We recently surveyed more than 1,100 renters about their experiences and found that in-unit laundry is the single most important amenity. After that, preferences vary by region.

Air conditioning is popular in the south and midwest, parking spots are hot in the northeast and west, northeasterners like to be near public transit, and southerners love yards.

So what might a post about your great amenities look like? Remember, social media is a place where it’s okay to let your personality shine, so feel free to take advantage of background colors and emojis that will make your post stand out on people’s timelines.

It’s also probably best to keep your text short and sweet. Say just enough to catch people’s attention and provide them a way to get more information if they’re interested (e.g., by linking to a full listing).

5. Create Events

On Facebook, you can create an event and invite people to it and promote it on your timeline. One way to use events as part of marketing a rental property is to create an open house for a property viewing. Obviously, this won’t be possible in all cases, especially if the unit you’re renting is currently occupied. But if you’ve got a block of time where you can show the space, promoting an event can be a nice way to get yourself on people’s radar.

Another idea landlords can use to market their rentals: create an event for a session where you offer something of value to potential tenants. For example, you could do a session on how to rent your first apartment as a college student. Or how to find roommates. Or how to keep your utility costs manageable when the weather gets especially hot or cold.

The point is that by creating events, you give prospective tenants a chance to get to know you and see that you’re a reasonable person (and vice versa). This builds trust and makes them more likely to apply for one of your properties next time a vacancy comes up.

6. Share Useful Content

If you’re on social media as part of your rental property marketing strategy, your goal is to win the trust of potential tenants. One way to do that is to show them you care about them by sharing interesting and valuable content.

The easiest and most effective way to do this is to follow people and brands who post content relevant to the experience of renting. That way, all you have to do is scroll through your own feed and share content as necessary.

Like hosting an event, this helps you establish yourself as someone helpful and trustworthy to future renters.

7. Use Social Media Ads

So far, we’ve been offering ideas for marketing your units and business for free on social media. But social media platforms also offer paid advertising options you can use to get your message in front of a larger audience.

Social media advertising works by letting you pay to get your message in front of people who aren’t already in your network (i.e., people who don’t already follow you or your page).

But is this worthwhile?

It depends on your goals. If you’re finding it easy to fill your units without paying to promote them on social media, it probably doesn’t make sense to pay for more views. But paying to advertise on social media might make sense if:

You have an odd rental calendar: In many college towns, for example, rental showings happen months before leases start to accommodate the academic schedule. You can use social media ads to target your likely audience and remind them to set up showings rather than counting on them to remember themselves.
You want to minimize friction for tenants: The “send message” button on Facebook ads, for example, gives potential renters an immediate way to get in touch. This might be handy if you have an unexpected opening and are looking to fill a unit on short notice.
You’re growing an empire: If you plan to acquire many units or offer services other than rentals (e.g., if you’re also a real estate agent), social media advertising may help you get your name in front of potential customers. As you grow, this brand awareness will help you secure new tenants.

In any advertising situation, of course, be sure to take time to calculate the ROI of your ad dollars to make sure you’re happy with the results.

Use Social to Build a True Network

Of course, the real marketing value of social media goes beyond any single idea or strategy. People use social media to connect with family, friends, and brands and celebrities they admire.

If you focus your social media efforts on connecting with people (meaning you engage with them and their posts), you’ll see positive results in the form of increased brand awareness, increased trust, and (down the road) an easier time filling your vacancies.

Still have questions about the marketing basics for your properties? Check out our marketing tips for rental listings.

The post 7 Tips for Marketing Your Rental Property on Social Media appeared first on Avail.

House Hacking 101 With Craig Curelop of BiggerPockets

Alana Stramowski — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 18:17:56 +0000

The strategy of “house hacking” is not new and may sound simple, but in reality, effectively executing a house hack requires a lot of thought and preparation. From finding the deal, saving the down payment, securing a mortgage, finding and managing tenants, dealing with taxes, and so much more, house hacking can get deep into the weeds very quickly. Luckily, there are resources out there that break this all down.

The newest of these resources is “The House Hacking Strategy” by Craig Curelop of BiggerPockets. With a release date of October 3, Craig’s latest book breaks down how anyone can use their home to achieve financial freedom. We had the opportunity to chat with Craig about his latest book and why he believes house hacking is one of the best decisions someone can make.

What Is House Hacking and Why Is it Important?

Craig: House Hacking is a real estate investing strategy where you purchase a one- to four-unit property with a low percentage down payment (typically 3-5%). You live in the property for one year and rent out the other rooms (in a single family) or other units (in a multifamily). In these situations, the rent fully covers your mortgage and you live for free or even get paid to live!

House Hacking is important because it does so much. From a financial perspective, it allows you to eliminate what likely is your largest expense: housing. You may even be making money on a monthly basis. All while paying down your loan, the property appreciates, and there are multiple tax advantages as well. Between these wealth generators, house hacking is a great way to establish a strong financial foundation, and for those seeking financial independence, it’s a great way to expedite that journey.

From a real estate investing perspective, it’s valuable because it is a great way to get started investing in real estate. It’s your home, but also your rental. It’s a nice transition into being a landlord. For example, if any repairs need to be done, you just come home and do them. Then after one year, when you move out, it becomes a rental and you slowly grow your portfolio that way.

Why Did You Decide to Write This Book?

Craig: My passion is helping people become financially independent. I wrote this book because I wanted to educate the masses on house hacking. Again, it’s such a powerful way to build wealth. So many people have money issues or are stuck in a 9 to 5 job that they hate. House hacking can help everyone design and live their ideal lifestyle away from the 9 to 5.

How Did You Get Into This Line of Work?

Craig: I hated my previous job in Silicon Valley. Because of that, I decided that I did not want to work forever and I needed to find a way out. When I started searching for ways to “retire early” I ran into financial independence, real estate, BiggerPockets, and went very deep down the rabbit hole. Now that I know it’s real and so many people can do it, this is great!

Tell Us About Your First Property. Do You Consider Yourself a House Hacker?

Craig: Yes, I am 100% a house hacker. I would even go as far as calling myself a serial house hacker. My first property was a duplex in the Whittier neighborhood in Denver. It’s an up/down duplex. Both units are one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartments. I rented out the top full-time and lived in the bottom. That wasn’t quite cash-flowing enough so I decided to rent my room out on Airbnb. I put up a cardboard room divider and paper clipped it to a curtain to create a quasi-bedroom out of my living room. I slept on a futon out there for a full year.

With the additional Airbnb income, I was able to make more than my mortgage payment and totally live for free. I saved all the extra money and that allowed me to purchase my next property a year later.

What Advice Would You Give Someone Just Starting Out in Real Estate Investing and House Hacking?

Craig: If someone wants to get into house hacking, I would tell them to pre-order my book. Additionally, I would highly suggest going on BiggerPockets and listening to podcasts and reading the house hacking blog articles. My advice for a house hacker is to not get caught up in the numbers. Just do a deal. The sooner you do your first deal, the sooner you will be able to do your second deal and so forth.

Once you’ve found your perfect property, let Avail help you manage it.

The post House Hacking 101 With Craig Curelop of BiggerPockets appeared first on Avail.

How to Get Rid of Pet Odor in Your Rental

Alana Stramowski — Wed, 28 Aug 2019 14:53:31 +0000

Since Americans own an estimated 78 million dogs and 85.8 million cats, it’s important for landlords and tenants to know how to get rid of pet odors in their rental units. Renting to tenants with pets can be lucrative, but getting rid of pet odors is critical for any landlord looking for a new tenant.

Not sure how to eliminate pet odor from your rental? Here’s where to start:

Clean Regularly with Pet Odor Eliminators

This may seem obvious, but we’ll say it anyway. If the rental property has carpeting, tenants with pets should vacuum their rental regularly, since carpeting is more likely to absorb pet odors than hardwood floors. Good Housekeeping recommends sprinkling baking soda all over the carpet before vacuuming to help absorb odor.

Don’t know how to get rid of dog smell? Realtor.com advises pet owners to vacuum dog beds once a week and wash dog beds every other week. Cat owners should clean out litter boxes at least twice per week, if not more frequently, and replace the kitty litter or sprinkle baking soda over it to reduce odor.

What You’ll Need: Baking Soda and a Vacuum

Deep Clean Periodically

Go beyond vacuuming your carpet or using a Swiffer on your hardwood floor. HomeAdvisor recommends thoroughly scrubbing and mopping hard surfaces with a vinegar or baking soda solution if possible. Vinegar is the pet odor eliminator, and it deters cats from peeing where it’s been placed.

If the rental has carpeting, call a professional carpet cleaning team that uses a hot water extraction method and a truck-mounted carpet cleaning unit, because it will deliver a better clean. Ideally, landlords should be deep cleaning in between tenants.

What You’ll Need: Vinegar or Baking Soda

Clean the Upholstery

It’s not just the floors you have to worry about when you are a pet owner or a landlord who rents to pet owners — removing and washing or dry-cleaning cushion covers to get rid of pet urine smells is just as important.

Good Housekeeping recommends that cat owners try an enzyme-based pet odor remover that can be poured on fabrics if cat urine has soaked into them. Once you’ve let it set in, soak and blot the fabric. If this doesn’t work, they recommend hiring a dry cleaner who specializes in fire or smoke damage who can use an ozone machine to deodorize the fabric.

What You’ll Need: Enzyme-Based Pet Odor Remover

Clean the Walls

If you still smell pet odor and you’re not sure where it’s coming from, check your walls — especially those near your cat’s litter box. You can use a combination of water and vinegar to eliminate the smell or repaint the walls altogether. If you decide to give the walls a fresh coat of paint, use a primer that will lock in or eliminate the odor before applying paint to the walls.

What You’ll Need: Water and Vinegar or Primer and Paint

If All Else Fails, Refresh the Flooring

If the pet order you’re trying to remove won’t go away, it’s probably time to replace the carpeting or the flooring within the unit. According to Home Advisor, installing new hardwood floors could cost between $2,501– $6,733, while new carpeting could cost between $762–$2,522 to install.

What You’ll Need: New Floors or Carpeting

Maintaining a Pet-Friendly Pad

If you’re planning to rent to pet owners, it’s worth noting that you can protect yourself by charging pet rent fees and requiring pet owners to carry pet insurance. With Avail, landlords can indicate to renters whether your unit is pet-friendly or not. That way, you can find (or turn away) renters with furry friends.

For tenants using Avail, check out the online maintenance ticket feature, which will allow you to let your landlord know if your apartment needs repairs or deep cleaning thanks to your canine or cat companions. Note that this kind of maintenance will often come out of your pet deposit or you’ll be responsible for covering the cost.

The post How to Get Rid of Pet Odor in Your Rental appeared first on Avail.

4 Tips for Tenant Retention: How to Keep Good Tenants

Alana Stramowski — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 16:26:11 +0000

Finding (and keeping) good tenants is an important part of maintaining cash flow as a landlord. But even the best tenants might end up leaving if you don’t make an effort to maintain positive tenant relations. That’s right: Tenant retention depends in large part on how you set the stage for your relationship with tenants.

As it turns out, communication is a huge part of maintaining a positive relationship with your tenants. In fact, a failure to respond quickly to tenant requests is the number one reason tenants give for being unhappy with their landlord: 35% of renters who report being unhappy say the reason for their dissatisfaction is that the landlord doesn’t respond to requests fast enough.

That can be frustrating to hear, especially when your response time expectations don’t line up with your tenants’ expectations. But regardless of whether you’re on the same page, these four tips can help you maintain excellent tenant relations and boost your tenant retention rate.

1. Agree on Communication Preferences and Respond in a Timely Manner

People are used to communicating through various channels — texting, phone calls, emails, and apps. And while our tenant survey found that texting is the most popular method for communicating with landlords, only 48% of tenants consider it best, which is fewer than half of tenants. Another 28% like email, 13% prefer phone calls, and 10% like in-person conversations.

To outline best methods for communication, it’s a good idea to include communication preferences or guidelines in your welcome letter to tenants. Here’s an example:

To ensure the fastest possible response, please use the following communication channels for the given scenarios:

Phone calls to report urgent information (e.g., water gushing out of a pipe).
Text to ask non-urgent questions, especially late at night.
Email to communicate information that multiple parties need to know.
Avail portal to submit maintenance tickets or request changes to your lease.

It’s also a good idea to talk through your preferences with your tenant in person so they can ask questions about how you’d prefer various situations be communicated.

However, once you find out which communication method your tenant prefers, be sure to stick to that one to avoid confusion. It’s also essential that you respond to tenant requests in a timely manner. As outlined above, poor response times (or a lack of response) will damage your tenant retention success.

2. Set Up a System for Tracking Maintenance Requests

If you’re hoping to boost your tenant retention rates, look no further than your maintenance system. The No. 2 reason tenants cite for not renewing a lease is that the property isn’t well maintained — roughly 12% of tenants report moving for this reason.

Responding to and dealing with maintenance requests for your property is crucial if you want to keep tenants happy and maintain the value of your property. Avail offers a maintenance tracking tool to make the process of reporting issues and tracking their repair easy and transparent for both you and your tenants.

Tenants can submit maintenance requests with photos and details at any time from their account. You can respond, keep them updated on repair progress, and log finalized receipts and notes of the repair that took place for your records.

3. Let Tenants Pay Their Rent Online

Allowing your tenants to pay their rent online using a method of their choice makes the rent payment process easier and more beneficial for them. Mailing checks is a hassle, and tenants miss out on perks like credit card points or boosting their credit scores through rent payments when you collect rent checks.

Platforms like Avail allow tenants to pay their rent with a bank account, debit card, or credit card. Rent payments can be set up in advance and automated through Autopay, and Avail sends both rent reminders and rent receipts so both parties have a record of what’s been paid.

Plus, tenants can boost their credit scores by paying rent on time through CreditBoost — an added perk that helps them improve their financial health while renting.

4. Offer Lease Renewal Incentives

If you have great tenants in your property, offering incentives for them to renew their lease can be a helpful way to encourage them to stay. Offering to maintain the current rent rate, agreeing to make certain updates to the unit, or even waiving certain fees (like parking) or discounting a month of rent can help incentivize tenants to stay in your property.

Of course, any invectives offered should make sense for your property financially and should be weighed against the potential cost of finding new tenants and the possibility of a rental vacancy. If you do decide to offer incentives and a lease renewal to tenants, make sure that the incentives are outlined in the new lease and agreed to by both parties.

Retain Your Tenants With Avail

The key to tenant retention is being a communicative and responsive landlord who makes the renting process easy. Avail offers tools to simplify every step of the rental process, from digital rental applications and leases to online rent collection and maintenance tracking. Plus, Avail offers tools that make renting better for tenants, like easy online rent payments and the ability to boost their credit scores by paying rent.

Avail is free for unlimited units. Create an account today or log in to get started.

The post 4 Tips for Tenant Retention: How to Keep Good Tenants appeared first on Avail.

Update Your Rental Property Strategically

Alana Stramowski — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 15:19:08 +0000

It’s not a secret that an “updated unit” can draw eyes (and clicks) to a property listing. But which updates are worth the investment? If your goal is to find good tenants and keep them in your unit, there are five that may be worth your money.

Invest in a Professional Cleaning Between Tenants

First, invest in a professional deep clean between tenants, if at all possible. Why? Because, for about $150 per unit, you can transform the look and feel of a space. What’s more, a sparkling-clean unit sets the stage for a great landlord-tenant relationship: right off the bat, you demonstrate that you care about them and about the unit.

Good tenants will appreciate that effort and reciprocate by taking better care of the unit while they’re in it.

Fix Broken Appliances

This should go without saying, but because maintenance issues came up so often in our tenant survey, we figured we’d mention it again here. Broken and malfunctioning appliances are the kind of things that chip away at a renter’s patience. Over time, the irritation of an oven that won’t heat up or a tub that won’t drain can convince even otherwise happy renters to move.

Note that this item is related to communication, too: make sure you respond promptly when tenants report broken appliances and keep them posted on the status of repairs. If they feel like they have some control over the situation (i.e., they say something and it triggers a repair), they’ll be much happier and more likely to renew the lease.

Update Paint and Light Fixtures

Putting on a fresh coat of paint and choosing light fixtures that cast a pleasant glow are relatively inexpensive upgrades, but they can make an apartment feel fresh. Making these upgrades before showing a unit may even make it possible to justify a slight bump in rent.

Update the Flooring

To be clear, laying new floors isn’t cheap. But upgrading to hardwood or tile floors may be worth the investment. Both hardwood and tile are durable and both appeal to higher-income tenants.

Upgrading your space in this way can definitely enable you to charge more in rent and may help you attract the kind of renters who are steadier, more dependable tenants.

Update Kitchen Countertops

As with flooring upgrades, putting in new countertops can be costly, but it can also attract more financially stable tenants. For example, families with young kids are the most likely age group to entertain guests at home, so if you’re looking to rent to that often stable demographic, you’ll make your unit more appealing by ensuring the kitchen and dining areas are places they’d want to share with friends.

Of course, the specific upgrades that make sense for any one landlord (or any one unit) will depend on the details of your situation. But generally speaking, these five tend to yield a good return on investment by helping landlords attract good renters, setting the stage for positive communications between you and your tenants, and raising your building’s property value.

How to Find Good Tenants: Don’t Rush

We started this guide by noting that vacant units are one of the worst things for a landlord’s cash flow. One thing that can be even worse is a terrible tenant — one who doesn’t pay rent, causes damage, or even forces you to go to court over one disagreement or another.

So while all of these tips are important to help you find good tenants and fill your vacancies, keep in mind that a vacant unit is better than a unit occupied by a tenant you’re not sure about.

Walbye, the landlord from Fort Collins, put it this way: “Even in the worst rental times, it pays to be patient and wait for a good tenant, even if it costs you a month’s rent.”

We couldn’t agree more. For more insight on how to fill your vacant units with excellent renters, check out our guide to finding tenants you’ll love. Once you’re ready to take the next step, screen potential tenants and create a digital lease on Avail.

Happy Renting!

Previous Chapters In this Guide

The post Update Your Rental Property Strategically appeared first on Avail.

Perks to Allowing Pets in Your Rental Property

Alana Stramowski — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 22:08:08 +0000

If you’re wondering how to find tenants who are responsible and take great care of your property, look no further than pet owners. Many landlords balk at the notion of letting pets in their units because of the potential for increased damage that animals bring. But the reality is that letting Fluffy and Fido live in your building will likely improve your cash flow and help you attract better renters.

Welcoming Pets Means You Can Charge Pet Fees

It’s perfectly acceptable to charge pet rent for tenants who bring pets into your building. You can charge either a yearly fee (typical ranges are $200 to $500) or a monthly rent add-on (typical ranges are $10 to $50).

Pet Owners Tend To Be More Responsible

One Avail landlord says, “My tenants with pets are generally more responsible, more qualified and stay longer.” It makes sense: tenants who have to care for another living creature have responsibility built into their everyday lives.

More Than Two-Thirds of Americans Own Pets

Fully 68% of American households have pets, which means if you don’t allow pets in your unit, you’re limiting your pool of tenants to just 32% of households. What’s more, only 55% of landlords currently allow pets in their units. By saying yes to pets, you can stand out among the responsible tenants looking for their next home.

As with everything, though, there are risks associated with allowing pets in your units. Some renters insurance policies, for example, won’t offer coverage if the policyholder has certain types of dog breeds. If you do decide to allow pets, you may want to consult with your insurance provider to see whether your policy has any exclusions for specific pet types.

In this Guide You Can Also Find

The post Perks to Allowing Pets in Your Rental Property appeared first on Avail.

Communication With Your Tenants Is Key

Alana Stramowski — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 22:03:03 +0000

Keeping the lines of communication open is one of the most important things you can do as a landlord – and the good news is, there’s no one way to do it right.

Preferred Communication Methods

Overall, tenants in our survey preferred the following communication channels with their landlords (Figure 7):

Text: 48%
Email: 28%
Phone calls: 13%
In-person conversations: 10%

Source: Study conducted by Avail surveying 1,100+ tenants renting properties in the U.S. (2019)

Those preferences are pretty consistent among all age groups except renters who are 55 or older. This group is more likely to prefer talking on the phone (22%) and less likely to prefer texting (37%).

Communication Through Property Management Platforms

If you use a property management platform like Avail, you can even communicate within the software (as with the maintenance tickets we mentioned earlier). And there’s no reason you have to keep to just one communication method, either. Feel free to supplement regular texts and emails with occasional in-person check-ins, for example.

Here’s how Walbye handles it: “We do inspections at least once a year, and we meet plumbers and handymen at the units when maintenance is required,” she tells us. “This gives us a chance to see how the unit is being treated and check in with the tenants.”

That’s a great example of how keeping communication lines open can benefit property owners. There are many more. Generally, though, it’s important to understand why communication matters so much in this relationship. Think of yourself and your tenant as co-stewards of your space. It’s in both of your best interests to keep it in good shape, address maintenance issues early, and know how to reach each other in case of an emergency.

If you often find yourself frustrated with tenants (or other people in your life), you may be able to improve your outcomes by adopting some of these habits of great communicators.

In this Guide

The post Communication With Your Tenants Is Key appeared first on Avail.

Screening for Good Tenants: Lease Renewal Factors

Alana Stramowski — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 22:00:15 +0000

Your property’s in great shape. You’ve got tip-top listings published in all the best places. Now all you have to do is wait for those applications to roll in… kind of.

When it comes to finding good tenants for a rental property, receiving applications is only the first step. Then comes the tenant screening process to determine whether the tenant is a good fit. In addition to examining an applicant’s credit history and employment, you may also want to consider how likely they are to renew.

Every time a tenant renews, you save yourself the cost of going through the screening process – something that many landlords find stressful. But having a process for screening is a crucial part of both keeping your units full and keeping your sanity.

Rachel Tolmachoff, an Avail landlord, offers this advice: “Don’t contract out your screening process. I always have maintenance managers and people who do maintenance,” she says. “But I never turn over tenant screening and lease writing to a property manager because they don’t assume liability for putting in a bad tenant.”

In other words: you should be the one doing the screening because you have more skin in the game.

Understand Factors that Affect Renewals

If you’re screening tenants with an eye toward preventing vacant units by maximizing your odds of lease renewals, consider these data points we pulled from our tenant survey.

Age

First, tenants under 25 are least likely to renew a lease from year to year (Figure 4). We found just 24% of this group planned to renew a lease, compared with 41% who were not planning to renew and 35% who were undecided.

Source: Study conducted by Avail surveying 1,100+ tenants renting properties in the U.S. (2019)

This isn’t surprising, given that younger people tend to be less settled and therefore more likely to move around. Plus, the 18-to-25 age group may include a lot of college students, who are more likely to be shorter-term renters (if attending college away from their hometown).

Renters aged 25 to 34, on the other hand, are the most likely to renew a lease: 43% plan to renew their leases, compared with just 24% who aren’t going to and 33% who are undecided (Figure 5).

Source: Study conducted by Avail surveying 1,100+ tenants renting properties in the U.S. (2019)

Renewal rates among renters 35 and older are slightly lower than those in the 25-to-34 age group (about 41% plan to renew and 23% plan not to). Again, these rates aren’t surprising given life stages: during the late 20s and early 30s, many people have found more stable living situations and tend to stay in the same unit longer.

Of course, we’re not suggesting that the way to find good tenants is to avoid renting to anyone under 25 – for one thing, that’s illegal. But more to the point: if your goal is to find good renters and keep your units full, knowledge is power. If you’re renting to younger tenants, be prepared for higher turnover.

If you’re prepared for units to turn over frequently (and if you own property in a college town, you may not have a choice) you’ll be able to plan ahead so that you can consistently find good tenants.

Roommates

Another factor that affects people’s likelihood to renew a lease is whether they have roommates (Figure 6): while 32% of tenants with roommates don’t plan to renew their leases, only 23% of those renting solo have such plans. Further, 40% of solo renters say they’ll renew, compared with just 36% of those with roommates.

Source: Study conducted by Avail surveying 1,100+ tenants renting properties in the U.S. (2019)

What’s interesting about these numbers is that landlord satisfaction has nothing to do with renewal plans. Those with and without roommates had identical landlord satisfaction levels (83% were happy with their landlords and 17% were dissatisfied).

So if you own properties that attract groups of roommates, keep in mind that you’re likely to see greater turnover than if you rent properties intended for a single renter.

Space

One final note about renewal intent: if a tenant with whom you have a good relationship doesn’t plan to renew, ask them why. The single biggest reason renters cite for not renewing a lease is that they want more space. If you happen to have an available unit with more space, you can offer it to your tenant and make everyone’s lives easier.

And that bit of advice leads us to our next strategy for finding and keeping good renters.

Be Prepared for Nonrenewal

Regardless of who you rent to, you can help prevent vacancies by sending a letter asking about renewal intent 90 days ahead of the end of the lease.

Request a response by a certain date (usually 60 days before the end of the lease) so that you know as soon as possible whether you’ll have to market the unit for the following year.

In this Guide You Can Also Find

The post Screening for Good Tenants: Lease Renewal Factors appeared first on Avail.

Advertise Your Rental Property the Right Way

Alana Stramowski — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 21:53:05 +0000

Many landlords are hungry for apartment marketing ideas, most likely because they think that creative marketing is key to finding great tenants and filling unit vacancies.

In reality, it’s more important to master the basics: crafting excellent property listings and posting them on the listing services where your renters are most likely to be. Let’s break those down.

Property Listings

What does an excellent property listing include? Three main features:

An eye-catching title that summarizes what you’re offering
A detailed description of the unit
Photos of the property

We recommend writing your title last, once you’ve created the rest of the listing. It should highlight the most important and attractive features of the unit, from a potential tenant’s point of view.

In the property’s description, be straightforward and clear. One adage from the early days of eBay is good to follow: “Write the description as if there are no photos, and choose photos as if there is no description.”

In addition to summarizing the salient facts about your property (number of bedrooms and bathrooms, for example), be sure to mention the amenities. Most tenants consider certain amenities make or break, so listing them in your description helps ensure that neither you nor they waste time on an application if the unit doesn’t have what they want.

As far as which amenities are most attractive to tenants, the data shows us that everyone wants in-unit laundry: around the country, at least half of renters consider laundry the most attractive amenity.

After that, though, importance varies based on geography (see Figure 2). Air conditioning is much more important to renters in the South, for example, and having a parking spot matters most to renters in the Northeast, where land is scarce.

Source: Study conducted by Avail surveying 1,100+ tenants renting properties in the U.S. (2019)

And because real estate is a hyper-local business, your neighborhood and its residents probably have their own preferences and standards. Get to know these to make sure your listing shines.

Photos

Believe it or not, the photos you post of your unit can help you attract tenants. Most research on photos in real estate listings focuses on properties for sale rather than properties for rent, but the lessons apply in both scenarios:

Having more photos helps your unit get rented faster.

While a for-sale listing with just one photo spends an average of 70 days on the market, a listing with 20 photos gets snatched up in just 32 days.

High-quality photography helps your unit get rented faster.

Professional photos of a property lead to 32% faster sales. Landlords can expect professional-quality photos to translate to qualified applicants applying more quickly.

Where to Post Listings

Once you’ve crafted the perfect listing, it’s time to post it in the right place – where your prospective tenants are looking for apartments. For most people these days, that’s Zillow (see Figure 3). In fact, a whopping 78% of renters check that site when they’re looking for their next home.

Source: Study conducted by Avail surveying 1,100+ tenants renting properties in the U.S. (2019)

But most renters look at at least a few listing sites. Other popular destinations include Trulia, Craigslist, and Apartments.com.

If uploading a listing to multiple websites sounds like more trouble than it’s worth, consider signing up for Avail. Our platform automatically distributes listings to multiple sites.

The takeaway: when it comes to listings, the secret of how to find tenants isn’t really a secret at all. Just make sure your listings clearly communicate what you have to offer, and you should have success.

The post Advertise Your Rental Property the Right Way appeared first on Avail.