As a real estate investor, the last thing you want is a property that is sitting vacant. The loss of rent from just a few months of vacancies in a year can easily turn a profitable investment into a losing one for the year when looked at on a cash flow basis. Plus vacancies can create other problems. Insurance companies do not like vacant properties and they make a good target for vandalism.
There are only three ways to minimize the length of vacancies.
- Make sure that your rental units are desirable. I’m not talking about desirable from a fashion point of view. Plain vanilla rentals are very desirable as long as they fit the criteria for the area. What I mean by desirable is that the number of bedrooms/baths is what the average renter seeks in your community. If the most common rental in your community is a 3/2 with 1500 sqft and you are trying to rent a 1/1 with 600 sqft, you will have a harder time getting a renter as your unit does not represent what the most common customer wants. The other factor of desirability is the monthly rent. It needs to be in line with similar units to ensure a quick rental.
- Start looking for a tenant early. If you have a lease expiring in 60 days, it might be the right time to start looking for your next tenant. You would of course verify that your current tenant doesn’t want to renew the lease before looking. (And if they do, it is a good time to get them to sign a lease for the next year.) By starting the process early, you have a good opportunity to have a renter lined up to move in right when the apartment becomes vacant. That is a good position to be in.
- Build a rener’s hot list. This is an internal list that you create from every potential renter that calls. Your hot list will include their name, address, phone number and what kind of rental they are looking for. Every time you have a rental come up, you call the people on your hot list before investing in advertising. This process just might yield you a tenant with no advertising cost to you.
Craigslist is a great way to build your renter’s hot list all at no charge to you. Here is how you can do it.
Craigslist has a section called apts/housing. It is equivalent to the real estate for rent section of the newspaper. Whenever you have a rental become available - or about to become available - you can run an ad in Craigslist for your city at no charge. You can run this ad as often as you need to. In busier cities, you might post your ad (or a variation of it) every day. In less busy cities, once every few days is probably enough.
However you choose to collect the leads, you will have several potential renters to call back to rent your unit. You will also have a great start to a renter’s hot list. As you speak with each one, ask them questions and save the answers for later use. Good questions are neighborhoods they are interested in, price range, unit size, etc. You never know when someone might become one of your renters in the future.
If you have enough rental units, you can just keep running ads in craigslist to build up a large list of renters who are currently or will be looking for a new place to live in the future. Keep in touch with all your renters on a periodic basis and you will soon find that renting your units is no longer a problem.
And if you are smart, you collected their email addresses when you contacted them (or when they filled out your contact form) so that you can just mail out your rental hot list to the group every time a new unit becomes available.
How great would it be to have lots of renters calling you to rent every rental unit you have as soon as it becomes available?
This can be accomplished with Craigslist and a renter hot list.
To learn more ways to use Craigslist to build your real estate empire, you need a copy of Craigslist for Real Estate Investors.
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