Are you a landlord? Whether you manage one or multiple rental properties, being a landlord involves many different responsibilities and expectations. You’ll need to have experience with tenant screening, marketing and advertising your property, maintenance issues, and financial considerations such as rent collection and taxes—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg! It can seem overwhelming at first, but successful landlords know all of their rights under the law and understand how to balance business decisions with ensuring the wellbeing of their tenants.
In this blog post, we’ll present 5 must-know tips for becoming a successful landlord so that you can navigate the rental market without any unnecessary stress or worry. So, let’s get started—read on to discover five tips every savvy landlord should store away in their toolkit!
Renovate Once a Year
The first tip on this list, if you want to be successful as a landlord, is to renovate your properties at least once every year. Keep in mind that these renovations don’t need to be very big; they just need to add some value to the property in order for you to increase the annual rent.
With that being said, if you are a landlord for an apartment building, renovations can be quite expensive, so it might be a good idea to do something that will add value to the entire building, such as getting replacement windows or freshening up the exterior with a fresh coat of paint. One thing that your current and future tenants might love if you are renting out houses would be solar panels, since renewable energy is a popular topic now.
Set the Best Price
The next tip on this list for any successful landlord, and a tip that any successful landlord would give you, is that you have to set the best price for your properties. One of the biggest mistakes that landlords tend to make, especially those who are new to being landlords, is trying to set a price that is far too high.
While this is completely understandable since you want to get the most money out of your properties, it might end up backfiring on you. One consequence of setting the rent too high is that your current tenants might leave, and you might struggle to find tenants again, because the price is too high.
Keeping Tenants Is Better
If there is one tip that any successful landlord would give you, it would be that keeping tenants is far better than trying to find new ones. If you want to be a successful landlord, you should try your best to keep your tenants happy in order for them to stay.
One way to think about it is that your tenants are your job. If you have a job, you have a stable income, and if you lose your job, you might sit at home unemployed for some time. As such, if you keep your tenants, you are going to get a stable income from rent. However, if your tenants leave, you are going to be without tenants for maybe a couple of months.
Be There for Tenants
This leads us to the next step in order to be a successful landlord, and that is to be there for your tenants when they need you. Of course, while it is understandable that you can’t always be there for your tenants’ every need, you should be there for most of them.
The primary reason for this is that, as mentioned above, keeping tenants is far better than trying to find new ones. More importantly, the last thing you want is a negative review, since this might impact your ability to find new tenants in the future.
Use a Letting Agency
Finally, the last tip on this list, if you want to be a successful landlord, would be to consider using a letting agency. While this might seem a bit contradictory at first because, if you are using a letting agency, you aren’t actually doing all of your jobs as a landlord, it will help in the long run.
Letting agencies will collect the rent from tenants every month, and if tenants aren’t able to produce the money, they will take it from there without you needing to be involved. More importantly, letting agencies will also be able to find tenants for you so that your properties don’t sit empty for months on end.
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