Professionally Estimate Rental Rates Anywhere With No Experience

Truly understanding rental rates in any area takes a lot of time and experience. If you don’t have time nor experience you have to leverage the info from those who do.

How much rent can I expect?

The beauty of investing in real estate is that you don’t have to do everything yourself. If you want to know what a house might rent for ask someone (property manager) who optimizes rental rates for a living. It’s really that easy. There are three ways to leverage property managers.

• Give a local rental agency a call and ask about their services and how much you could expect in rent. It’s free to have a consultation, and, in just a few minutes you could walk away with 5-15 years of rental knowledge for that area. You could take that time you just saved mulling over boring numbers and spend it finding better deals.
• Go to a few local rental agency websites and see what they charge for homes/apartments in your area. Square footage is a good way to determine prices for similar homes. If all homes nearby are renting for $1/ft2/month then that’s what you can expect. Insider Tip: price per square foot is how most real estate is valued.
• Bonus Leverage Tip: Ask the property manager where they would invest if they had the amount of money you have. If you sat down for a half hour with 10 different property managers that each had 10 years experience you would gain 100 years of experience in 5 hours. Think about that for a minute.

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. “  -Archimedes.

Many people turn to Craigslist to see what rates to expect. If this is what you’re thinking then its time for an intervention. Stop.

While craigslist is great for finding tenants it is not so good for determining rental rates. When your average amateur landlord is having a hard time finding a renter on Craigslist they don’t usually work on their advertising, marketing or even try to provide more value to renters; they simply lower the price. Not so good for you.

People go to Craigslist for the same reason they go to Walmart; lower prices are more important than quality.

If property managers are able to get more profit than landlords, copy what the property managers are doing i.e. professional photos, house descriptions and websites used for advertising. Whatever you do, don’t try to compete by lowering your prices; add more value instead.