Is my rental cursed?!

[Colm McCormack]

I have a 4/2/1 rental in a desirable area that’s about 1,700 SF and I can't get it rented! I had a motivated seller call me on my bill board, negotiated the short sale, bought it and had it fixed up so it’s clean & pretty. I have had it on the rental market for 3 months and get 8 showings per week! To date, I have only had 1 application, which I rejected. The house is on Rentals.com, Craigslist (three different times!!), in the ReMax manager’s advertising system, has a yard sign and even neighborhood directional signs. I lowered the rental amount so I am now the lowest priced rental in this area for its size. I have even allowed for some (small) pets. Anyway, do you have any thoughts on getting it filled? Feel free to ask me any questions to get a better idea of the situation.

[Jon Holdman]

Things like location, property condition or psycho neighbors all translate into price. If you've done 100 showings with only a single application, its overpriced. But perhaps theres something you can do, perhaps not.

You say its the lowest priced for its size. I'm not sure what that means. if you have a 1700 4/2 in a neighborhood of 1000 ft 3/1's, you're probably not going to get much more than the going rent on those 3/1s. That's about what's happen in one of my areas. A 1000 ft 3/1 will bring about $1000 while a 1500 ft 4/2 might get $1200 and a 1800 ft 5/3 might get $1300. If you're computing a $/sq.ft. number you may be overpricing just like sellers apply the same math and overprice a large house.

My point is that if you have a house thats much nicer than its neighbors, and that would rent for substantially more if it was in a different neighborhood, you still won't get much more than is typical for the neighborhood. 100 showings is telling you that for the house, as it sits, in the location its in, its overpriced.

I don't think your market is substantially worse than here in Denver. I had a fellow landlord mention to me a few days ago he had recently had two midnight moveouts and was able to re-rent both properties the next day.

Is there some major defect you're overlooking? Busy street? Bad smell? Bad neighbors? Something?

Have you asked the people who are viewing it what they think? I generally figure it takes about ten showings to get a good tenant. Most viewers don't fill out an application (the almost all take them, though.) So, I rarely have more than one or two applications to screen. I do explain my criteria right up front.