How to make my rental more attractive

[Cory Melious]

Hey everyone.

I’m looking for some advice. I’m having trouble renting one of my units and I’m looking for some ideas on how to proceed.

Quick note ::: there are some links at the bottom of the listing and tour....

I currently have a 3 unit property in upstate ny where the weather is cold about 6-7months of the year. . Unit 3 is a one bedroom with electric heater renting at 635/Mo. Unit 2 is a two bedroom with electric baseboard heat renting at 800/Mo. Unit 1 is a two bedroom with oil forced air heat not renting at all. It was getting 830/Mo (it’s about 400sqft larger than unit 2. The tenants bailed out on me in November Bc they didn’t want to pay for the oil heat themselves. It’s a 1200sq ft apartment which is recently remodeled and a very nice apartment for a family. It was renting last year at $830/Mo. This is the problem place.

Learning that the tenants didn’t want to pay for oil heat, I assumed it was due to them not having the cash flow to shell out $300-$400/Mo for a tank of oil. I figured I’d deal with that burden myself and instead list the apartment for $960. That price resulted from $830/mo plus the averaged out cost of the oil. It seems like a reasonable price, but I’m not getting much action on it. I get a few interested people but they have mostly flaked out.

My question to you all is, how should I proceed? Do I chalk this up to holiday time lag and wait until the new year, or am I charging too much due to the price of the oil heat? It’s uncomfortable to have it just sitting there but I don’t want to lower the price too far that I end up with a deadbeat in the place. I also don’t want to run the risk of driving my price down so low that the other 2 bedroom unit wants his price lowered as well. An option I thought of was to install electric baseboard heat in there and rent at a lower price.

Here is my listing for the apartment. It’s on Zillow’s sites, Facebook, and craigslist.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2681-Sanitarium-Rd-Clifton-Springs-NY-14432/31893305_zpid/

Also I have a Virtual tour on YouTube which isn’t linking properly on Zillow. Need to fix that.

https://youtu.be/xjT1pbh8Wd4

Thoughts?