You’ve got your first rental property, now you need to learn more about finding a tenant. What good is your property and all of those cash flow projections without a tenant to pay that cash? There are a lot of ways to find tenants these days, even if you are managing your property from afar. This post will take a look at some of the most popular ways to find tenants.
What Services Do You Need?
There is more to finding a tenant than just, well, finding them. Once your property is up to code and ready to rent, you will need photos for your listing and a plan to let prospective tenants see the property. You will also need several services to market your property and screen tenants.
Fully Outsource Finding a Tenant
If you don’t want to worry about finding tenants, then a property manager is for you. A PM will screen tenants for you and either pick or send along a select list for you to choose from. It doesn’t come without cost though. Some PMs will include a separate line item charge for placing tenants, while others will include it in their standard fees.
There are some fully remote tech enabled property managers that can also perform this function. It will come with a lower cost, but also some headaches and shortcuts. More on this later.
Services You May Need
- Photos for your property. Professional photos can make a big difference in getting prospective tenants interested
- A marketing service. Today, you can’t rely on people driving by to see a sign. Well you can, you will just have a much longer turnover experience.
- A tenant screening service. Don’t take tenants at their word that they will take good care of your property. Perform a background check and call previous landlord references.
- Touring capabilities for prospective tenants to see the property. They will need either a guided tour or tech enabled access.
Marketing Your Property
You want tenants to find you, and today there are several services that can help you get your property in front of prospective tenants. The biggest name on the board is probably Zillow, but there are a number of services that can market your property for you.
Finding a Tenant the Old Fashioned Way
There is no reason you can’t still put an ad in the newspaper, but that’s really not a common way for folks to find apartments these days given the decline of local newspapers. That said, Craigslist is still around and free to post on. If you’ve got the time, why not?
Using the MLS and Your Real Estate Agent
Agents can post your listing to the Multiple Listing Service which will get picked up by sites like Zillow and pushed out to the masses. Your agent can also help you screen tenants and set up open houses or walk through appointments. Typically, these services do not come cheap. It is not uncommon to see a half or full month’s rent charged to place a tenant. That’s a pretty big hit to your profitability metrics.
Tech Enabled Marketing
Many of the tech offerings today are going to wrap a lot of the services you need into a nice package. It is very common to see listing services wrapped in with tenant screening. Many of these services will also include what’s called “syndication.” Syndication is the process by which your one listing gets spread out to several other listing sites automatically.
Zillow is a great example as they will put your listing on their site as well as a couple of affiliated sites. They will also screen tenants (at their cost) using background checks and income verification. Finally, you can sign your lease digitally through their service and even collect rent payments digitally. Their service is free the first time but costs $9.99 per week of active listing afterwards. The service is called Zillow Rental Manager if you want to check it out.
Services similar to Zillow include Rentals.com, which will syndicate to their network of smaller sites for a small price and upcharge you to post on the bigger networks. Apartments.com is a free listing site, though you can pay to push your listing to the top of search lists in a featured listing. Their network includes 12 sites that your listing will get pushed to. Both of these services can also handle tenant screening and rent collection.
More Than Just Marketing
There are some sites that do more than just listing, screening, and rent collection. Some tech enabled services will help with the management of your property after signing a lease. These services will continue to bill you monthly after you find your tenant, but will add some additional benefits.
Coordinating Maintenance and Accounting
Sites like RentRedi can help you keep everything straight and streamline maintenance requests between you, the tenant, and your team. RentRedi can also outsource the handling of maintenance calls using a service called Latchel for an additional fee. With regard to marketing, RentRedi will help you market, screen, and sign tenants as well as collect rent. However, these services tend to have an additional fee to syndicate to the bigger rental websites like Zillow.
Doorloop is another service similar to RentRedi. While there are other services out there, several of them are built for “enterprise solutions.” Enterprise means not meant for small landlords.
Showing Your Property to Prospective Tenants
One of the most time consuming aspects of finding a tenant will be scheduling times to let them see the property. You may make the drive and they may not show up, and a lot of us just don’t have time for that. An agent can handle this for you, or you can use a “self touring” service. I am a big advocate of this type of service as I have a full time job and easy touring access can speed up the rental process dramatically.
A good example of one such service is Rently. They have reasonable pricing for single rental owners, but can also scale up dramatically and work with several large property management companies. Basically they rent you a lock box and coordinate screening and entry of prospective tenants all online. This does come with some risks as tenants will be walking through your property all by themselves. Success stories using self touring far outweigh the few horror stories of property damage or squatters.
All in One
If you want to list your property, screen tenants, sign online, get your payments collected, and show your property to prospective tenants… but you don’t want to pay a large percentage of rent for property management, then you’re looking for a remote property manager. You could mix and match services like RentRedi and Rently above. There are also companies that will package these things together.
Caretaker got their start subletting apartments in big cities, but has since expanded to full remote property management. The service is fairly new, but covers the marketing, lease signing, and rent collection in one place. Similar to Rently, the service will also manage tenant self tours of the property. Similar to RentRedi’s additional management service, their team will handle the tenant’s maintenance needs. You will only get emails when there is a bill over your threshold or a property specific question that their team can’t answer.
Finding a Tenant
As you can see, there are many different ways to find a tenant. Managing property has become much more tech friendly, thanks in part to COVID’s acceleration of virtual or remote management.
The first step to finding a tenant is understanding what services you will need to get the job done. Once your marketing plan is in place and you’ve created your lease, you’re ready to put your listing out there. You may need to adjust your rent if you don’t get enough interest, but keep at it and you will get it done!
