Last time I shared a quick and dirty run down of how I evaluate the profitability of a rental property. In this series I’m going to share my tips on how to market it to attract good tenants. No matter how good the unit or the cap rate is, vacancies and the wrong tenants will kill your returns.
1. Know your target audience
Good marketing starts w/ the question “who is my customer”, regardless of industry. Which demography would appreciate the location and amenities of your unit the most? I’m not asking you target only certain race though, that’s violation of Fair Housing Act. Is it young professionals that want close to commute options? Is it budget renters looking for no frill housing? Is it a young family with kids and desire to be in a good school district? Knowing this will help you tailor what features to highlight in your listing.
2. Professional photos
Take the extra effort to clean the unit and hire a professional photographer. Have the place staged, too if you have the budget. Renters spend 60% of their time online looking at photos. You cannot afford to have poor photos for your unit. Personally, I also believe people lack imagination so the staging helps them envision how it’ll be like living there. If it’s a small apartment I actually will show it empty so it looks bigger and cleaner.
3. Copy writing
Pro tip: interweave the features of your rental into your listing description. Paint a picture for the renter what life will be like living there. The best example I’ve ever seen is probably this Airbnb listing in Malibu. After that I’ll quickly list the bullet points of items people typically care about like the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, size, rent and deposit amounts, pet policy, location, and your contact information, laundry hookups, air conditioning, pool or new carpet.
4. Advertising
If your HOA or neighborhood allows for signage definitely take advantage of that. Otherwise, to broaden your reach now you have to go online. Once upon a time I used Rentlinx but then they started charging. You can still get a 30-day trial though, which is usually enough time to secure a tenant. It’s an awesome service that lets you enter info about your rental property once and broadcast to tons of listing portals. I only have a couple of units so I don’t really have a need for that but if you’re property manager I could definitely see how helpful this is. Honestly, most of my leads come from some of the major sites so I don’t care if it’s sending my listing to 100 portals, I just want to make sure I hit the five biggest ones.
Craigslist – I post every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Most of my inquiries come on Friday when people are thinking about looking at places over the weekend. Monday I found pretty good as well as people start their search again after not finding anything they like the previous weekend. Wednesday really just for the hell of it so it stays fresh on top of the search results. I know people that post daily but I think it’s overkill.
Zillow – Aside from Craigslist I get most leads from Zillow and its network. Your listing on Zillow would also appear on Trulia and HotPads.
Apartments.com – Pretty good results from these guys. CoStar, the same group behind LoopNet and many other real estate sites, created this portal. They have been pretty aggressive in raising awareness for this site and I can see the amount of leads I get go up accordingly. It doesn’t work as well for single family homes though.
Zumper – Mixed results from Zumper right now. They’re still in startup mode. I like mostly because the listing would show up on PadMapper.
5. Referrals
Good old fashion referrals still work, too. I post on my personal Facebook, housing related groups, and I’ll ask my friends at major employers to post to their internal housing discussion boards. Make sure you don’t use a Craigslist link for that because the link expires after 7 days.
A few parting words on leads you receive. Pre-screen to get rid of the tire kickers. I hate wasting time showing the unit to people that are not prospects. I usually use these three questions to sniff out their needs and sense of urgency:
- How soon do you need to move?
- How long have you been looking?
- What kind of place are you looking?
If there are certain feature or the lack thereof about your unit that would not be a good fit for this tenant, better to disclose that and focus on the prospects that are truly good fits. Lack of parking – do you have a car? HOA doesn’t allow dogs – do you have any pets?
Next time I’ll dig into what I consider the most important part of landlording–tenant screening. When done right, it can make your life so much easier.
