Back to Rental Property Owner FAQ
A quick answer is that it typically takes between 3 to 4 weeks for us to find a tenant. We don’t expect to have a rental property to be vacant over five weeks of it having entered the Philadelphia rental marketplace. As far as marketing, we find good tenants by extensively marketing for them in ways few property owners can imagine.
You set a property management company to task to manage your rental property as an investment. That means (by definition) that a property management company needs to make you money, not cost you. In other words, Grow Property Management will make you more money than you will ever come close to paying us.
One main way is by making you more money in rent then your property could make otherwise.
And it’s actually not that hard for us to find you a very high quality tenant, and one that is willing to pay above market rent for your rental property. Take a moment and ask yourself this question: if your job was to spend 40 hours a week marketing property rentals to get maximum rent, would you be far better at it than you are now? Would you be able to get far more rent, than someone else that isn’t dedicating 40 hours a week, every week to this goal. Add in our experience, and our very elaborate and involved systems that we have refined over time, and also take into account that we are just not one person working just 40 hours a week; and you begin to understand how we will get you more far rent, and faster, then you could get otherwise.
That’s important because:
- Reduced Vacancy. Each month your rental property is vacant costs you in missed rents. So getting you a tenant sooner is a pretty important priority. How much more money will you have if we get you a tenant one month sooner than you would have gotten otherwise?
- Multiple Applicants. If your property is vacant and you are losing rental income, you would be happy to hear that we found you a good tenant that will start paying that rent. But what if we didn’t just find you one tenant; but we found you three possible tenants? Not only did we find you a tenant; but we now get to choose the best tenant out of three possible tenants. That means we can get you a tenant that will take better care of your property and possibly even stay longer. What if we found you five potential tenants hoping to rent your property? Think about how important that is to you and you will have a sense of how important our marketing is.
- Increased Rents. Grow Property Management will find you a great tenant that will pay you more per month in rent, than you can find otherwise. That’s the point.
Due to the size of our property management company, there is never a given point that we are not actively marketing vacant rental units. That gives us a certain level of readiness as a property approaches the Philadelphia rental marketplace. We are already actively looking for tenants. We already have those systems in place and we already have a steady flow of potential tenant leads in our pool. In any given day, we can have over 40 inquiries of tenants contacting us for rental properties. The more properties we have available for rent, the more likely we are to be able to fill those vacancies quickly. A vacant property can create well over a 100 leads of potential tenants. Since that property can only be rented to one tenant, those other potential tenants are directed to our other available rentals, or even better, these potential are made aware of currently rented properties that are soon to be available. One common way we find tenants for available properties are from tenants willing to wait for the right place. The benefit to the property owner is having never to experience vacancy between tenants.
Statistically, 83% of all rental properties are found online, and between the hours of 8 & 9 am ,and 11 & 12 pm. Also interesting is that each time someone goes online during those hours to find a rental, they only look at an average on 3.3 rental listings. So it is paramount that we make sure your vacant rental listing is one of those 3 that will be seen. And we need to capture the prospect then and show your rental as the best option against the competition.
That can be easy as long as we remember another rental market statistic: Property seekers are either photo/video people or description people. Meaning, when looking for a potential property to rent, someone will look at one or the other. They will rarely look at both photos and read the rental descriptions. So every component needs to be able to stand on its own, or we lose an entire segment of our marketplace.
Property rental marketing requires:
- Great Marketing Photos. Photos should be of the same quality and professionalism that you want the tenant to see their future interaction with us will be. When tenants are changing homes, they are looking to upgrade their lives. The photos should offer them that. The property photos should also accurately represent the rental. If a property isn’t right for a tenant, let them see it before they step foot in it. The increasing the right traffic is important; but showing the property to those tenants that the space clearly isn’t right for, only creates unnecessary wear and tear.
- Great marketing video. A well done and well edited rental marketing video can be a very powerful marketing tool. It allows us to control what the viewer is seeing. We control the entire user experience unlike any other marketing medium.
- A Great Marketing Description of the Rental and its Neighborhood. As a tenant looks for their new space, it's important to convey your property’s appeal. And also the appeal of the neighborhood, which can almost be of equal importance. We also need to give the tenant an idea of the functionality of the space. As with property photos, the property description must be well written, have zero typos and demonstrate the quality a potential tenant can expect from doing business with us. Remember, this is the tenant’s first exposure to our property management business and first impressions me a lot.
For us rental property marketing will always be a numbers game. We don’t market to find a single tenant. We market to find as many tenants as possible and we never know where a potential tenant might come from. Potential tenants often come from our own current tenants changing properties, past tenants that seek us out having had a good past experience with our company, from our pool of leads created from another vacant property, from the MLS with real estate agents seeking commission, from corporations using us a reliable placement service for their employee relocations, our For Rent signs throughout the Philadelphia, from posting on hundreds of rental sites, marketing campaigns on several social sites and advertising.
Regardless, of where a potential tenant has found your rental property, responsiveness now becomes everything. Here’s a statistic that should sober anyone looking to fill a vacancy. If we take just 30 min to get back to a potential tenant inquiring on your rental vacancy, we have over a 83% chance that we will never hear from that prospect again.
Few landlord property owners, real estate agents or even most property management companies make it a priority, or are even in position to make it a priority, to respond to rental inquiries immediately. But given the above statistic, you will agree it must be done. We offer Instant Showings on most vacancies and that alone allows our clients far higher rent than their property can get in the rental marketplace.
How Quickly Can We Get a Tenant?
Typically it will take us between two to four weeks to find a tenant for your rental property.
But that is a tough thing to answer - for a variety of reasons. The first question that comes to mind, is when we consider our ideal tenant. Say we have a vacant rental property and a potential tenant contacts us and says they want to rent it this very day... The first thing that is on our minds, as a property management company, is: “Why?”. “What is going on in your life that you need a rental property right now, at the very last minute?”.
The question we have about that potential tenant is: “would a reasonable person, a person who would pay their rent on time and take good care of a property, leave their search for a place to live to the very last min?” Typically no. Generally speaking our ideal tenant is a tenant that began their search for a place to live in advance to when they would need one.
All that said, life does happen and we do often rent properties and fill vacant units within days of the property entering the marketplace. For one, we don’t know when the tenant began their search. They very well began their rental search months ago and just found your rental property today.
And it’s not uncommon for us to convince an incoming tenant to take a property early, before their current lease expires. They might do this if they are competing with an equally qualified tenant. Or many tenants will take a property before their lease is up, at another rental to make the move much easier. Also, there are bad landlords out there, just as there are bad property management companies out there. Sometimes lined up rentals fall through. Commonplace is when a landlord or property manager never secures the proper compliance requirements. We have found many tenants that need a last minute place when the property owners sold the property, and offered the tenants a lump sum to vacate asap. Or the landlord or property manager wasn’t able to get the current tenant out in time. Another common issue is with uncared for rental properties, that simply “break” before a tenant is set to move in and the property in inhabitable. There are variety of reasons that allow us to validate a tenant’s need for a fast solution. But it’s important to remember there are often reasons why there are weeks between tenants.
Also There is a Rental Season
Or rather, an “unseason”. Clearly, real estate and the rental market as a whole greatly slows during the winter months. And the rental market all but stops between Thanksgiving and New Years.
And the Current Rental Marketplace
There are also other factors that affect how quickly we can place a tenant. The main one has to be price. If we have a property owner that insists on being too high priced, their property will clearly be vacant longer. Especially when we look at the ever changing supply and demand of the rental market and the properties condition and location.
After all is said and done, it is extremely likely that Grow Property Management will secure you far more in rent than you could ever get otherwise. And its is extremely likely that the increased rents will likely exceed the amounts you pay for our service. In that respect you are getting paid to use our service. And that is the point of real estate investment!
What if I already have a tenant?
Then there isn't that charge. We only charge a property owner if and when we need to place a new tenant for them. If you already have a tenant in place before our service begins; then you would just begin paying the monthly management fee.
