4 Ways to Exit Your Rental Property

Now a lot of times when people buy a rental property, they don’t really think about how they’re going to exit the property. And even if you don’t plan to exit it, you always want to purchase it with that in mind. It’s like creating a business. You always want to create a business with the plan to how you’re going to sell that business one day, and you want to build it to sell it. Same thing with the rental property. So we’re gonna talk about very quickly some of the ways.

Selling it on the MLS, the Multiple Listing Service

Now, normally that’s gonna be your best option for getting top-dollar for your property, and you can get top-dollar for your property using the MLS. The only challenge is that if you have it as a rental property, you’re gonna have to vacate the tenant. You’re gonna have to do maybe some upgrades to the property, and there’s gonna be some holding time while the property is listed for sale. And you wanna make sure that when you are looking at a property that you are gonna sell that it’s competitively priced, meaning it looks good for the area. Sometimes a rental property, you gotta do some upgrades to it.

Selling it on the MLS to an investor.

Now normally they’re gonna look for a discounted price. The plus is though that you can sell it with a tenant in the property normally. If you’re gonna do that, I recommend that you make sure you have all the rental applications and leases current and up-to-date; and make sure that the tenant is up to date; and you should be able to sell the property based on that information. And a lot of times, investors may be out of state or out of country may be more apt to purchase the property because it already has cash flow flowing on the property.

Sell the property for sale by owner

This is something that some investors do. They don’t want to have an agent involved in the transaction. You can sell the property by yourself. Just make sure you know what the current laws are, and any disclosures and anything you have to do. Sometimes you can list it on the MLS. You pay a flat fee to have it listed on the MLS, and that’s an option. But again, you wanna make sure that you protect your time and you know what you’re doing. A lot of times, people will get involved in trying to do a first sale by owner only to realize they’re wasting their time because they’re not exactly sure how to do it and they’re not sure how to vet the potential buyers.

Selling it through owner financing.

I’ve personally done this with rental properties. It’s a great strategy. The way that I did it was a little bit different, where I owner-financed it to an investor, not to an end-buyer. So there’s a lot of investors out there who cannot get a regular loan. Maybe they have too many properties, and they are willing to pay a little bit more of a higher interest rate and they are willing to do an owner-financing with 20-25% down, and you can sell the property that way on an owner-financed note, where you may do a 20-year note with a 3-year balloon, meaning they pay the property off in 3 years but it’s amortized on a 20-year schedule.

So there are different ways. The nice thing about owning real estate is that there’s not just one way to it. There’s multiple ways. There’s probably 20-30 ways that you can exit a property. This is just 4 of them!