What Potential Tenants Want to See

As the owner of an income property, you know how to maximize your profits when renting out your space. You know how important it is to manage your space and keep up with maintenance needs. You know your market, and you know what kind of rent you’re looking to charge. And you know that getting a good tenant is really, really important.

And how do you get good tenants? By giving them the things they want to see, of course. Here’s what tenants are looking for.

An online listing

Convenience is king these days, and nobody wants to go out looking for rental opportunities in flyers posted around town. We do everything online in our modern world, and apartment-hunting and house-hunting are no exceptions.

More than 90 percent of future renters look for their apartments and houses online these days. That means that you need to turn to landlord software solutions which make it easy for you to post rental listings online.

A compelling description

Future renters know what they’re looking for. So they’re going to scan your listing for keywords and phrases. In fact, they may not even see your listing at all if it doesn’t include those keywords and phrases, because those are the terms that these would-be tenants search for online in the first place.

So you need to get the right words and phrases in your listing, and then fine-tune them. While these potential tenants may know what they’re looking for, they can still be swayed by a great sales pitch. With the right keywords and compelling description, you’ll have a winning listing.

Photos that show your space in its best light

A good rental listing has plenty of photos. And the quality of the photos that you take of your space can really make or break the effectiveness of your listing.

Brush up on your best practices for taking photos of indoor spaces. You’ll want to take photos down hallways and from vantage points in the corners of rooms in order to get the most possible square footage into each shot. If you’re cutting space out of the frame, renters may get the impression that space is smaller than it is.

And when we say that your space should be shown in the best possible light, we don’t just mean that metaphorically. Everyone wants to maximize their home’s natural light, so spaces with nice natural lighting are obviously going to be more popular with renters. That means that you should take photos during bright daylight and really show your potential renters just how nice space can look with the sun shining in.

A simple rental application

Renters want to look for their next home online. They also want to be able to apply for the rental right there in their browser or on their app. So you need to provide a simple rental application online, right there with your listing.

Here’s some good news: great landlord software solutions include features that make it easy to do this, often at no extra charge. And you’ll also be able to use these online programs to perform background and credit checks on your potential tenants, which help you protect yourself from the dangers of a bad tenant.

Avoiding bad tenants

A bad tenant is one of the worst things that can happen to a good landlord. Bad tenants are disasters for real estate properties because they can damage the space and neglect cleaning and maintenance needs. Bad tenants may break the law on your property or throw parties that upset neighboring tenants. And bad tenants may even stop paying rent, putting a major dent in the “income” part of your income property business plan.

Getting a bad tenant out of your space can be a nightmare. Protections for renters that are built into several laws can make it difficult for you to evict bad tenants or recover unpaid rent. Your best bet as a landlord isn’t to boot bad tenants — it’s to put good tenants in your space from the get-go.