Uplevel Your Rental Property to Better Appeal to Tenants

Your rental – whether it’s a Home, an apartment, or a vacation rental – needs to be consistently occupied by tenants to be profitable. Fortunately, finding tenants is easier than ever – more people are renting than ever before, says a Policygenius report. Moreover, Rent prices are soaring nationally, meaning you can pull in good rent.

Still, just because finding tenants is easy doesn’t mean you can keep them. Tenant turnovers are a thing and can cost you thousands of dollars in lost revenues yearly. And then there are problem tenants – people who don’t pay rent on time, damage your property, and are bad house guests in general.

An appealing, top-tier property typically solves all these problems by attracting “high-quality” tenants – people who want to live there longer, are willing to pay more, and generally don’t make a mess. Here, Tom Stachler offers some suggestions on how you could upgrade your property to make it more desirable:

Make it pretty

Beautifying the property’s interiors and boosting the curb appeal will always score brownie points with tenants. You don’t necessarily need to spend a huge amount of money on this (although you can). Some affordable aesthetic upgrades are giving it a fresh coat of paint, planting a garden, deep cleaning the interiors (and carpet), putting up a painting, getting new curtains, and letting in more natural light.

Provide in-demand amenities

Functional upgrades let you command a premium price for your rental. Some in-demand amenities are washers, dryers, furnishing, extra-spacious rooms, home offices, patios, luxury kitchens, luxury bathrooms, landscaping, high-speed internet, and air-conditioning. Do your research and calculate the ROI before you make expensive upgrades.

Get good reviews

If you own a vacation rental, good reviews mean everything, and good PR (which involves bad review management) will make you significantly more profitable. People will flock to a property with good reviews and hosts who care. A single bad review can scare people off. Bad reviews are less of a worry for traditional landlords, but landlord review sites do exist and are worth keeping an eye on.

Be responsive to repair (and other) requests

Regularly maintaining and repairing your property is one of your obligations as a landlord. Too many landlords are tardy or lax about it, though. Needless to say, nothing turns a tenant off like a crack in the wall, a leaky faucet, or chipped paint crucial. Being responsive to help requests is essential to keeping tenants on, long-term.    

Advertise with high-quality pictures and a digital brochure

Advertising is essential if you want to find more tenants. To make a bigger impact, be sure to include high-quality pictures to allow people to visualize your property (and imagine themselves living there). Making a PDF brochure to showcase your property can be worthwhile. You can include key details about the home alongside pictures. You could email the file to potential tenants. You can quickly edit a PDF online to add pictures and text, change the page order, and more – all without having to print anything out. Simply upload the PDF file online, make changes, and download it again.

Make an LLC to be more credible (and protect yourself)

Establishing a limited liability company for your investment property offers multiple advantages. It makes you look more professional and organized, for one. For another, it protects you and your assets from litigation. To form an LLC, you can hire a lawyer or use a formation service (which is much cheaper). If you go with the latter option, read reviews to find the best service available.

Find good partners

Working with professionals can make your property easier to manage. Although it can be a bit of an investment, it can pay off in the long run (and save you time). You could, for instance, hire a property manager to take care of everything in your stead. You could hire a cleaning crew and handymen for maintenance and repairs. Last, but not least, you could partner up with an experienced realtor to find more desirable tenants faster.

Conclusion

When everything is said and done, being a landlord is being a part of the service business. Focus on being a good host, partnering with the right people, advertising yourself, and safeguarding your assets by forming an LLC. Your reward will be a steady, passive source of income that only grows with time.

 

Tom Stachler is a licensed Real Estate Broker in the State of Michigan.  Contact us for Investment/Income and Commercial Property Inventory listing and purchase assistance.  We have apartment, duplex and single family income properties as well as vacant and built out commercial property.  

Thank you Melanie Nelsen for your contributions