Residential Property Management: How to Prepare a Property to Rent Now and Beat Your Competition

The next thing we're going to talk about is how to prepare your property for renting. There are a lot of little things you could do. I see a lot of investors do too much. They spend way too much money making it way too fancy, granite countertops, high-end carpets, fancy trim and all this stuff in a moderate to low income neighborhood. We've got to think about preparing your property for rent that matches the neighborhood, that matches the economic reality.

At the same time, you don't want to do too little. I see this a lot. Investors try to cut corners. "I'm not going to paint that. I know it looks like 1970s paneling but its okay." What happens is, people come in they look at it and they walk around. Its okay, it's clean. It's all right. Then they go down the street to a fixed up property and rent it and never call you back. He took the old paneling off, put some nice drywall up there, painted it fresh, clean, and it looks modern.

Who do you think they're going to rent from? The guy down the street's property is going to rent a month or two early. Yours is going to sit. Again, if your property sits an extra month, that's $900, more costs. If it sits two months, that's $1,800. That would more than offset the cost of paying for the additional drywall and paint.

At that point, your property's now ready to be a long-term rental. We're going to talk about how to get your properties ready for rental.

Determine Rent and Market Your Property

We're going to talk about how to determine rent, a very important element. Where do you go to get comps? How can you do things of that nature and figure out what should you ask for rent, particularly if you just bought the property and you've never done that before?

Then we're going to talk about how to rent your property. We're going to go through a fair amount on this process that's marketing. As many of you know, marketing is really one of my passions. I love to talk about it. I love to teach it. I certainly love to test it and figure out what works.

As I said, we have about 15 to 20 properties at any one time, so we are constantly testing Craigslist ads, different websites that charge money. We test signs, we test working with the MLS system, the realtor system. We test all this stuff and try to work with what obviously works best, and we continue to refine that.

You're going to get that experience. We're going to talk about where to advertise. What websites are absolutely critical and how to advertise properly on those websites. There are probably five or 10 that are absolutely critical, including your own.

I mean every one of you, if you are serious about this, you should have your own website and you should be advertising your properties there and trying to drive some traffic there and using that as a place that people can go see photos of your properties, maybe even do a little video.

We are now moving into video instead of doing stills. We are doing three or four minute walkthroughs at a house, and then we walk outside and we videotape the neighborhood and we combine that with Google Maps. It's absolutely amazing. People can know more about this house sitting at their computer than in the past. It's just remarkable what they can do.