Question: Acquiring Tenants for Apartments

[Nik Sig]

Hello,

I am a student at Northwestern University and am conducting a quick survey for one of my classes. It would be greatly appreciated if you took a few minutes to reply to this email with brief answers to the questions below.

1.Do you have a problem acquiring good quality tenants (e.g. a tenant who pays on time, doesn’t break the lease, causes little disruption, etc.)?

2.Which pieces information about a tenant do you find most valuable when trying to determine whether the tenant will be good quality?

3.Would you be willing to offer cheaper rent prices to good quality tenants? “Good quality” is determined by the attributes that you listed above and not by race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, age, or disability.

4.If there was a service that provided a list of good quality tenants looking for housing, would you be interested in having access to that service and soliciting those tenants?

Thank you for your time and consideration.

[Marcia Maynard]

"We strive to provide safe, clean, affordable, comfortable and quiet housing for responsible renters in the neighborhoods of west Vancouver."

Our "all star" tenants pay rent on or before the first of the month, take care of the unit, are considerate of others and follow the terms of the rental agreement.

If I am thorough with my tenant screening process and consistent, I have a good chance of selecting a person who will become an quality tenant. Clear and effective communication from the get go is key. Most tenants need to learn how to be good tenants and my job is to set into place systems that will guide a tenant to succeed in fulfilling their obligations. I must be sure I fulfill my obligations as well. I do this by being firm, fair, respectful and considerate.

To answer your questions:

#1 We have written minimum criteria to rent. Most prospective tenants who don't meet our requirement will disqualify themselves and won't call. Of those who do call, it takes about 50 inquiries to find the one who is a good fit. Once I select them and they select me, I need to teach them how to follow the terms of our rental agreement and I must effectively enforce breaches if and when they occur. So we don't "acquire" quality tenants, we select those with the most potential and develop a working relationship with them.

#2 The qualities I am looking for are high integrity, open and honest communication, consideration for others, cleanliness, knowledge on how to take care of one's home, initiative and follow through, and being responsible. The four areas I screen are rental history, income history, credit history and legal history. Interpersonal skills are a valuable asset to any relationship, including the landlord-tenant relationship, so I look for those as well. A person's past performance is a good indicator of their future performance. Rule breakers are the most challenging and they tend not to mend their ways; I'm getting better at spotting them.

#3 We do not offer "cheaper rents". We place a fair value on the goods and services we provide. We don't offer a lower rent to one tenant over another. However, we reward tenants who perform well and there are consequences for those who do not. For example, tenants who pay their rent on time, take good care of the property and are considerate of others are the first to get upgrades, receive gifts from us from time to time, and rarely get a rent raise. Tenants who pay late, don't follow the terms of the rental agreement and are inconsiderate of others get more inspections, more fines, more rent raises, more security deposits raises, and sometimes face eviction.

#4 If there were a service that could assist me in marketing to good quality tenants and weed out the ones that are not good prospects, I would jump at the chance. People change over time. Some of the worst tenants have been able to turn their life around. Some of the best tenants under certain circumstances will change for the worst. So the list would need to be quite dynamic and up to date. If I used the help of an outside service, it would help me narrow the field of prospective tenants. But I wouldn't trust them to do as good a job as me and I definitely would do my own screening on top of it. :-)