Do you have a high turnover in your rental properties. Maybe it's just one, and you can't figure out why. It's always your good tenants that move, too, the ones you will miss. Why do tenants move? Is there anything you can do to make them not even think about leaving your rental
 |
property? If they get transferred to another city for a new job, will they say they want to find a landlord just like you?
It costs at least seven times more to find a new tenant than it does to keep the one you've got. Yet too few landlords work on keeping the tenants who are their best customers.
Most landlords do care about their tenants, in fact often too much and about the wrong ones. It's the bad or marginal ones, the ones who manipulate us who seem to attract most of our "care." Actually they want our sympathy. Why not care about your good tenants? After all, they are your good customers and are good neighbors.
We get so wrapped up in our daily operations managing our rental property that we forget about how our customers, our tenants, feel. Remember, it doesn't matter how well we think we're doing, the tenant's vote is the only one that counts. One primary critical success factor for any business is its ability to stay close to its customers. In this landlord manual there are scores of ideas and techniques for letting your good customers, your good tenants to appreciate you as much as you appreciate them.
We get so wrapped up in thinking about the tenants whom we would rather have move, that we don't show the gratitude we need to for the tenants who pay our mortgages, property taxes, and make us a profit, as well as be good neighbors and take care of their homes.
Table of Contents
Excerpt:
Good tenants like a nice place to live and are willing to pay for it. As a result they expect to be treated like a good customer, to receive good customer service, and to have their living arrangement be predictable.
Bad tenants, on the other hand, want a nice place to live, too. However, too many times they aren't willing to pay for it and are always trying to pull something to keep the landlord from getting his rightful rent payment. They like to keep things up in the air and in confusion because that helps their nonpayment of rent campaign. Often they have little respect for themselves and their surroundings, so don't take care of their homes, but want the landlord to take care of the problems the tenant creates for him.
You may find a considerable gap between a "good" tenant and an "ideal" tenant. What you call a good tenant varies by three factors—the property, the market and the rest of your tenants.
A "good" tenant in a unit that rents for $2,500 a month is going to look a lot different than a "good" tenant who rents a $250 a month studio apartment in a seedy part of town. With the high-end tenant you are likely to see perfect credit, a great job history, someone who takes excellent care of the property and who pays the rent on the dot the first of the month. The renter for the $250-a-month studio, on the other hand, works once in a while, but usually gets some kind of public assistance, is clean and fairly neat, and tries his best to get you the rent on time, but sometimes has a problem getting it together. Even so, you always get your rent.
Both of those renters are "good" tenants in their own way.
The market can also affect what you are willing to call "good." Once upon a time you could just think about putting up a sign on the outside of your building, maybe tell a couple of people, and all of a sudden get half a dozen applicants. You could set your standards so high that you knew you would never have a problem with a tenant.
But today things might be different. It sometimes may take three months to get someone halfway acceptable to rent from you, and you count yourself lucky to get a new tenant with enough money to pay all the move-in costs up front. Your definition of a "good" tenant could have changed considerably. Whoever pays the rent close to on time every month you may call one of your "good" tenants.
Your expectations also affect whom you consider to be a "good" tenant. If you expect tenants who pay late and are always a problem, Presto! you get them. A fellow speaker, Stacy Allison, who incidentally doesn't speak on real estate or property management, is also a landlord and she and her husband also own a construction business. She and I were discussing the landlording business one evening at a meeting and she told me, "You know, Bob, we always have good tenants, because we expect them to be good." I didn't quiz her on what she considered "good," but knowing Stacy, her tenants are probably people I would consider "good," too. They pay on time, take care of the property and don't cause many problems. She and her husband have never had to evict anyone.
$9.95 + s&h