Tips & Tricks To Leasing Your Home

Today we are going to talk about some tips and tricks on how to lease your property. First and foremost you want to make sure that the property is priced correctly for the current market conditions. You want to make sure that whatever you are pricing it at is not what it was maybe six months ago or last year, when you have conditions changing all the time depending on the time of the year. The winter times notably are normally slower than the summer and thus price is normally more depressed in the winter time. So you want to make sure you have accurate rental comparisons.

Next thing you want to do is mass market it. You want to make sure it is going out to as many possible directions to market as possible. Here in Houston we use the MLS, 68% percent of all leases are leased via the MLS. We also use our website which goes out to Zillow, Trulia, and Postlets. We have a lot of listings that go there and craigslist, and anything in your area to make the incoming phone calls as abundant as possible to be able to choose the best tenant.

You want to make sure that the property looks good. When someone drives up, that’s the first impression. You want to make sure that first impression is the right impression. First thing obviously when they drive up is the curb appeal. Colorful flowers are always the best thing, a well-kept yard, and maybe freshen and wash the house, or even paint the house. That first exterior look that they get is going to decide whether or not they actually get out of the car or they keep driving.

Once they get inside the house, you want to make sure that it smells very good. A lot of people use vanilla extract to make the house smell like vanilla cookies. And you want to make sure that all the lights are on. We recommend opening all the blinds. You want to make sure that it’s very clean. Nobody likes to see other people’s dirt or trash in the house. So you want to make sure that when you are going to show the house, make sure that you get there early and you make sure that these things happen.

Regarding things that go in the property, we have seen new paint and new or clean carpet will sell the best. People always like the new paint smell and they also like the way new carpet looks because they can envision their furniture and their belongings on the new clean carpet.

The other thing we do is we always make sure all switch plate covers for the outlets are always replaced. Those are normally very nice and clean and they give a nice appeal to the tenant.

The last thing I would say is make it easy for the tenant to sign up. When our tenants want to sign up, they can go to our website, they can fill out their rental application right there, they can pay with a credit card and we can run the credit instantly, as soon as they enter the information with their credit card. So you want to make it a very quick process, because if it does take a long time they are probably going somewhere else that is easier, even if your property is the one that they wanted