All Forum Posts by: Ron Rohrssen

@Ron Brady "Since she shows the houses, I've considered it smart spousal policy to let her do it her way since it is only her time."

This made my morning. It would have been worth 2 upvotes if I could. :-)

@Adam Martin...discrimination lawsuit. <sigh> You're right. Good point. I'm usually really careful about anything that might open the door to that. But, I had not thought of that in this case. With the numbers I'm seeing in interested parties (>200 for the last opening I had) there's no way I could personally contact each of them for pre-screening like I used to. I'll revert back to email responses for everyone and tighten up my available hours significantly to provide blocks on select days.

Yeah, I used to do open houses (pre-pandemic) like @Ron Brady. 

Thanks both of you. I'll definitely tighten this up on availability and quit trying to make the times so convenient for everyone else but me.

Scheduling viewings on rental properties and not having a prospective applicant show up is a pretty big problem for me. In my latest round of rental turnovers I averaged over 50% NO SHOWs. Of 8 appointments I had scheduled in 1 day for a SFH, 4 of them didn't show up, stopped answering their phone, and in NO way attempted to let me know their plans had changed.

This is a representative sample of my experiences for the last few years. Obviously this is aggravating and a big waste of time. I'll explain my process and I'd love to hear feedback on how others have dealt with this.

1. I advertise exclusively online through Zillow, Zumper, Facebook, Hotpads, and Apartments.com. I track every response that I receive to know that about 52% of my responses come from Zillow, around 23% on Apartments.com, and 20% on Zumper.

2. If the respondent disqualifies themselves by self-disclosing pets, or no income (yes that's correct they tell me they are unemployed), I send them my standard rental criteria and tell them the rental does not allow pets. 

3. For everyone else I respond with an email that thanks them for their interest, explains the rental criteria, and then invites them to use an online scheduling system (Calendly) to choose a date/time for viewing the home at their convenience. I typically offer 9AM - 6:30 PM on weekdays and 10AM to 3 PM on weekends.

I configured Calendly to give email and text reminders at 24 hours, 3 hours, and 1 hour before the appointment.

4. This year I started choosing about half of the respondents to also follow up with a personal phone call to see if they have any questions and invite them to verbally schedule a date/time for viewing. I simply enter the Calendly appointment information myself. They still get the email and text notifications about the appointment.

I wanted to see if technology (Calendly) is an issue for some people. The results showed me that I can get more people to commit to a scheduled viewing after answering all of their questions or concerns. But, this didn't affect the NO SHOW rate. That is still around 50%.

5. A respondent that views the apartment may become an applicant. The rate of conversion of a respondent to an applicant varies a lot and seems to be higher in the class C properties.

6. An applicant becomes a tenant. This might take a guarantor, a change in the security deposit, or some other change.

When I started with our first rental around 10 years ago, I NEVER had someone not show for an appointment. My listings were in Craigslist, Facebook, and the occasional poster at the grocery store.

Have people really become this much less considerate? I'm open to suggestions on how to reduce the NO SHOW numbers.

By the way, housing in our area is extremely competitive due to the Derecho which damaged or destroyed so many homes last year. My most recent SFH rental opening at nearly 200 interested people from the online sources I listed above. I did fill it on day 1 of showings; which was 1 of the 4 people that did show up.

@Marc Rice You're right. I am leaning toward some kind of a break. (I forgot to mention that I did give them 10 months of rent reduction for the loss of using the garage. Plus, I gave them the last month's use of the garage at no charge.

When I had it rebuilt, the sub-contractor quoted nearly $1,300 for replacing the garage door. That was discounted because they were already on site doing other work.

I have one other company lined up for an estimate. So far I'm between $1,100 and $1,300. 

Thanks Marc

@Theresa Harris Yeah. That's exactly how I feel. Once, have a little grace. More than 6 times, and on the left and right side to boot.

I was surprised to find that it's around $1,100 to repair it. 

@Greg M.Yes. I forgot to mention that I gave them a rent reduction for the loss of the garage. Good point.

@Robert Barbieri you might want to repost this in the Grand Rapids forum instead of Cedar Rapids. Best of luck.

I have a tenant in a C class home that used to have a nice over-sized 2-stall heated garage. The Midwest Derecho of 2020 destroyed the garage, and privacy fence. The home had some minor damage and the tenants were unharmed.

They helped with a LOT of tree debris hauling to the curb, for which I gave them several hundred dollars for their assistance.

The last repairs due to the Derecho were just completed, and they have been fairly patient during all of this. Especially since they completely lost the use of the garage for 10 months.

Generally they have been good tenants. It's their first time renting/living together. They gave notice and will be leaving in about 5 weeks. So, plenty of notice.

Unrelated to the storm, the tenant has backed into the garage door several times attempting to park too close. It was dented and pushed in, but it could be pushed back out and is still functional. Two of the four panels are crinkled and dented in several areas.

The replacement is about $1,100. That will eat up the security deposit and then some. 

Normally I wouldn't second guess passing along charges like this. He broke it, he's responsible for fixing it.

Thoughts?
Options? 
Or, just stick to my guns and charge him for the repair out of the security deposit, and bill the small difference.

@Brie Schmidt excellent points, especially the point about avoiding any TK provider that requires cash purchases and only their own appraisal. I came across one of those in Indianapolis when I was starting out.

Fortunately, I had enough knowledge to run my own analysis, and run comps.

@Mindy Jensen Thanks for the clarification.