To reduce vacancies, all landlords strive to maintain excellent tenants in their rentals. But you won’t always discover the ideal renters who will occupy your buildings for an extended period of time. However, tenant turnover is one of the most costly aspects of running a rental business. As a result, landlords make a lot of effort to raise their tenant retention rate.
Finding excellent renters that do all of these things is difficult, but if you have tenants who treat your rental property like it were their own, you will never want to see them leave.
Continue reading as we go over some advice if you’re looking for ways to maximise your rental business and experience fewer turnovers, which will hopefully allow you to avoid empty home tax on your property.
Look at your Tenants Carefully
Finding suitable renters for your rentals begins with a rigorous tenant screening process. Without a tenant screening, retention will be the least of your concerns. But even so, tenant screening is one of the most important processes in the leasing process, and it has a big influence on how many tenants you keep.
You should confirm an applicant’s income, conduct a background check, and get in touch with several references before allowing them to live in your rental home. Ask open-ended inquiries that will help you to get additional information from the tenant references you talk with.
Former landlords might provide invaluable information on your prospective renters. Assess their suitability for your home using the information provided.
Quickly Respond to Maintenance Needs
It’s important to keep a good relationship with tenants especially if you plan to ask them to renew their lease. Your renter may be more inclined to accept your proposal if you are diligent with property care and regularly examine the property.
Unresolved maintenance requests are among the most annoying things for tenants. You want to make it clear that you care about dealing with tenant complaints and providing them with a comfortable home. When your renter is debating renewing their lease, this may play a significant role in their decision. Long-term tenants may find incentives like thorough cleaning or carpet cleaning by a professional cleaning service to be quite appealing and may help them feel valued without breaking the bank.
Additionally, if you keep up with maintenance and deal with problems right away, you’ll spend less time on repairs when you eventually have to pass the unit over. Checking on the status of the unit on a regular basis can help you stay on top of maintenance issues that need to be resolved (that the renter might not have observed) and can prevent little maintenance jobs from becoming bigger problems.
Know What Tenants Want
Internet. Open layouts. Office Space.. Knowing the qualities that modern tenants are seeking in a rental property can help you better satisfy consumer demand.
The quality of the lifestyle is a key consideration for many renters, particularly younger generations like Gen-Z and Millennials, when deciding whether to stay or go. Even if you own the property, the tenant should be free to call it home. There are things you can do to provide a more individualised environment, which can encourage your renters to remain longer.
Offering amenities that tenants value the most might help you draw in better long-term tenants and encourage them to extend their leases. For instance, if your rental property is close to a university, your typical tenant might be looking for amenities like places with safe places to store bikes. In addition, thoughtful additions like hardwood floors, central air conditioning, and stainless steel appliances may make a house seem like a home. If you want to entice new renters or persuade current tenants to remain longer, these improvements may be worthwhile expenditures.
Treat your Tenant Fair
Because no renter wants to feel like they are being singled out by their landlord, all landlords are required to be knowledgeable of and to abide by local and federal housing rules. You must be consistent in how you treat your tenants, regardless of their colour, religion, sexual orientation, etc. Additionally, this entails being receptive, attending to clients’ problems, and not setting unreasonable rent prices. Yes, you are free to charge whatever you like, but if you overcharge members of certain, protected categories of individuals, you run the risk of being accused of discrimination.
When it comes to raising rent prices, keep them consistent and fair as well. While making money is certainly one of your top priorities in renting out your property, if you boost your rental rates too quickly, it can scare off tenants.
When a lease is renewed, instead of raising your prices automatically, perform some market research and explain why. Investors should often maintain rates below market rates and gradually increase them over time.
Get Property Management
Property management takes a a significant amount of time and effort to maintain.
While doing it yourself may make sense if you’re handy, live near your property, and don’t mind investing several hours each month to the chore, it’s not always feasible. Consider hiring professional tenant services to help take over many of your responsibilities. The following are just a few of the key responsibilities that help from a property management company may assist you with:
Setting the right rental rates: A professional property management firm will do a thorough market assessment to determine the appropriate rental price for your home, ensuring that you achieve the ideal balance between maximising monthly income and keeping a low vacancy rate.
On-time rent collection and deposit: Property management businesses have efficient, tried-and-true mechanisms in place to properly collect rent and maintain on-time payments.
Marketing your Property: A property manager will know exactly where to market your property and how to create compelling advertising materials, giving you a significant advantage in filling your properties quickly and avoiding long vacancies.
Property Management Toronto is committed to make landlord obligations simple for anybody to carry out, regardless of knowledge or experience. If we did not address all of your questions above, please contact us at 416.451.9499 or email info@propertymanagementto.com.