Whether you are managing a single-family home, condo, multi-family home or apartment complex, managing rental properties is not easy. Dealing with tenants can be especially challenging for property managers. However, good tenant management is key to keeping your property management clients happy and running a successful property management company.
Good property management will help you maintain a good relationship with tenants and reduce the tenant turnover rate significantly. To help you become a successful property manager, we’ve put together some of the best tenant management tips for you to try out today.
Learn more about 9 Common Tenant Complaints and How to Solve Them: The Ultimate Guide
Tips to deal with tenants and management
1. Use block viewings to generate urgency
When trying to rent or sell a property, try to arrange group viewings to generate a sense of urgency. Alternatively, you could schedule private viewings one after the other as a less obvious way of showing there is competition for the property.
2. Avoid communicating with your tenant directly
As friendly as it may seem, it’s unwise to communicate directly with a tenant if you’re using an agent.
There have been many cases of landlords handing over their phone numbers to tenants “just in case”, but when those landlords get woken at 3am about an alarm that won’t switch off – or they get called up about a request for a rent review – everything gets a bit more difficult and muddy.
Clear and defined lines of communication are easier to manage for everyone concerned!
3. Review your own rent
A good agent should review the rent annually, but some get lazy so it’s wise to set a reminder and do it yourself – just in case!
Some rental price fluctuations throughout the year are unrelated to overarching rental prices – e.g. the summer season typically sees increased demand from people looking to relocate, so rental prices increase accordingly. As a result, you’re more likely to get an accurate account of actual rental increases by reviewing the market at exactly the same time of year, every year.
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4. Do whatever it takes to minimize voids
“Voids” (a property sitting empty) is a word that sends shivers down any investor’s spine: just one month of vacancy each year could wipe out a profit or put a severe dent in your net yield. The secret to a profitable property, then, is to keep voids as low as humanly possible.
The first opportunity to do this is when you’re acquiring a property in the first place: see if you can get access after exchange and before completion to do any works that are needed, to reduce the amount of time that you’re making mortgage payments without rent coming in.
Even if you don’t get permission and have to wait to do the works, you can still market the property while a refurb is happening: not all tenants will be able to see past the chaos of a building site, but many will be delighted to see that they can move into a property that is being made as good as new.
While your property is on the rental market, be sure to keep on top of your letting agent and ask for frequent updates. You don’t want to cross the line into being a pest, but it’s certainly true that the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
And finally, once you’ve got good tenants in place, make sure you hang on to them. Fix any problems quickly, and be reasonable about rent increases: if a tenant leaves when you raise the rent from £500 to £550 and it takes you a month to find someone else who’ll pay that amount, it will take you nearly 11 months to get back to where you were in the first place.
5. Don’t squeeze the rents too hard
Property is a business and should be treated as such, but it’s well worth remembering that if you demand the highest rent, you’ll be reducing your potential tenant pool to a minimum.
If the rent is slightly off the market rate, it could be a blessing: your tenants will be aware of this, and they’ll appreciate living in your property. Rent is more likely to get paid on time, and your tenancy turnover should be lower.
While it’s possible that you’ll make slightly less profit this way, you’ll be maximizing your chances of a stress-free and easy property to rent – thereby allowing you to focus your time and energy on other pursuits!
Put These Tenant Management Tips Into Action
Learning better tenant management strategies takes time. You will probably make some mistakes at the beginning as a rental property manager or a property management company. However, as you perfect your tenant management system, you will find it much easier to deal with renters. This will help boost your occupancy rate and increase the return on investment for rental property owners.
When you’re ready to start being a landlord, find great investment properties on the AQRE Home platform today.
AQRE Home offers everything you need to make your dream investment a reality. Including:
- hand-picked investment properties
- Free property management tools
- a build-in messenger for easy offers and tenant communication
- realtor connections across the U.S. and Canada
- expert guidance from a team with 20 years of combined real estate experience
Get browsing and send offers with the click of a button on AQRE Home.
