New Tenant Search: 4 Strategies to Find Your Next Renter
For a property owner, finding the right renter is integral to continued success as a landlord. Good tenants keep your mortgage and taxes paid while acting as a caretaker of your real property. Bad tenants can make your life miserable and can also end up costing you a pretty penny in lost rent, damages, attorney fees, and other incidentals. Time spent without a tenant can be just as bad, with a great deal of revenue lost by an apartment or house being empty. However, finding the right tenant is easier than ever. Here are four strategies to find your next renter.
Social Media
Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Nextdoor are phenomenal avenues for finding new rental tenants. These sites are meeting places for people, and there are many groups that congregate and find rentals exclusively through social media sites. This is also a good way to vet potential clients that you meet. Someone’s social media presence is a good indicator of how they live, so weeding out troubling or problem clients is made much easier if you have access to their social media accounts.
Classified Websites
In the past, the only way to find a rental other than word of mouth or driving around looking for signs was to search in classified newspaper ads. In the digital age, prospective renters can find similar listings on sites like Craigslist and Kijiji. Taking advantage of these classified websites can save you substantial time and resources, and can help you narrow down your search to find the best tenants.
Public Search Sites
Public search sites offer the ability to locate the contact information of homeowners. You can use these sites to research the background of applying tenants. Performing a reverse address public search allows you to see information about the current owners, so you can better determine whether they are the right candidates to rent your property.
Rental Management Apps and Sites
There are numerous management sources like Pillow and Rentler that excel in linking renters to landlords. These sites tend to have both short- and long-term rentals and are famous for their ease of access. Simply create an account and create a listing for your property. After including the various details about the rental, and adding photos or videos, you will be able to accept online applications and screen tenants.
The above strategies will get you started on the road to finding your perfect tenant, but they are by no means the only way to find great renters. Remember that all real estate is local, and your best connections for finding the right renter might be a friend of a friend, or even someone you meet at the gym. Don’t forget to mine these social connections for all they are worth—doing so will make renting a property much easier.