Finding Tenants Fast

Krista Reuther:

Hi, I’m Krista. This is Seamus, and we’re here to help you be a better landlord. So, last episode, we talked about how you found your property, everything that went into assessing that deal. This time, I’d love to learn more about how you found your tenants. Finding the tenant was super easy. Just in terms of a timeline, we found the property on July 3rd, and my wife came across a Zillow listing for it, right? We recognized the face of the real estate agent. We called them that afternoon. We got into the property. Wow, and by the next morning, we had it under contract. All these steps that I’m talking about, we did very, very quickly because, fortunately, the majority of this information is publicly available, or you can write it into the contingency of closing.

Seamus Nally:

Yeah, so we looked at the property, and within 16 days, we had closed. Since it was the equivalent of a cash offer, before we even closed, we listed the property on TurboTenant. Because we had all the images, we literally uploaded them. We did the rent-ask estimate calculator. As I said, we settled on what we would ask for rent, and we had it listed. And so by the time we closed and got the keys, we already had a handful of leads that were interested in coming and seeing the property. That process was very, very smooth. One thing that we did do that slowed the process down a little bit, but I would absolutely do again, is we listed it at the high end of the local rent for the area for two reasons.

One, obviously, the more you can get from a rent standpoint, the better the property is going to cash flow. But two, having it on the higher side from a rent perspective also will change some of the applicants you’ll get. We wanted to attract applicants that had a solid source of income, and so that helped a great deal. In fact, because we are very explicit within our property description with our renter criteria, we actually had renters contacting us. They would mention as part of the pre-screener that we do, they would actually mention whether or not they fit our requirements, which is really helpful because they kind of would select themselves out.

Krista Reuther:

No, and that’s a great way to keep things moving quickly without sacrificing quality. So you mentioned the pre-screener really quickly. Tell me more about that. How valuable was that to you as a landlord moving through all of these leads?

Seamus Nally:

Yeah, so you’re doing a lot of things at once as a landlord, especially when you’re purchasing a brand new property. We’re closing on the property. We have leads coming in. Any lead that came in without a pre-screener, first, we would give them a couple of hours to fill it out after they actually submitted the lead form. Then we would just reply to them, thank them for their interest, and give them the link actually to the pre-screener. And so we got a pre-screener from every single person that we did a showing for. We actually made it a requirement. We would say, “Thank you for your interest. Please fill out this form, and then we can schedule a showing afterward,” which was really, really helpful, just to make sure that we were not showing it to people that it wouldn’t be a fit for.

Krista Reuther:

Sure, no, it’s a great way to qualify the lead and make sure you’re not wasting your time or theirs. So, you mentioned the pre-screener. I’d love to know more about how you use that and if it helped you sort through your leads.

Seamus Nally:

Yeah, so we required anyone that we were going to do a showing to first fill out the pre-screener. And so previously, I hadn’t done it with the tenant before. I had given them the form; they just sent it to me. But the act of doing it with them, I really liked, and it let them know how much I was trying to investigate different things to make sure that they weren’t unfairly accused of causing any damage at the time of move-out.

Krista Reuther:

Yeah, I mean, I feel like that sets up your landlord-tenant relationship really well. It’s another conversation that you guys have, where you’re saying, “Hey, I have a vested interest in you getting your money back at the end of this tenancy.”

Seamus Nally:

Exactly. And because we closed faster than I anticipated we would, and we started marketing the property before we had even finished closing, it felt like we were ahead of the game enough that if we had to be a little bit pickier, we could. And that’s the way we thought about the rent price as well. We started out high, knowing that, “Hey, if we don’t fill it by a certain time, we can drop the rent, we can allow pets. There are different things that we can do to sweeten the deal for a tenant.” And one of those levers you could pull is the security deposit. Talk to me a little bit about that. Did you decide to do it as one month’s rent, something else?

Seamus Nally:

From a security deposit perspective when we had it posted, we just had it as one month’s rent. And then the tenants that we found actually had co-signers. And when we saw the background and the credit reports of both the tenants as well as their co-signers, we felt very secure from that standpoint. And so we actually reduced the security deposit in that conversation to less than one month’s rent. One thing that I didn’t fully appreciate was the investigation into HOAs. That is one of those underlying expenses that can really flip a good investment, you know, into a break-even investment or even an upside-down investment. That is a big thing that I would encourage everyone to make sure that they’re looking at.

Seamus Nally:

And the last thing is just when you’re thinking about prepping a property for someone to move in, just think about those little things as if you were moving into a place. What would you want in there? And I think it’s a really good way to set up a strong relationship, and honestly, as a landlord, it’s very inexpensive and doesn’t take a lot of time.

Krista Reuther:

I love that. Well, Seamus, this was a blast. Thank you so much for answering all of my questions.

Seamus Nally:

You’re welcome. And if anyone has other tips or things that I did to find a tenant that they feel is completely wrong, please let us know in the comments. And don’t forget to subscribe.