If you advertise on Zillow and all of your prospects who respond to that Zillow ad are 'low quality',....would increasing the advertised rent attract a better quality applicant?

The house I have on Zillow has rented for $600.00/month for the last 10 years! I am tempted to pull the ad off Zillow and then re-post it at $695.00/month. Has anyone here ever done this and gotten better quality applicants ?

Amount of rent makes a huge difference in quality of prospective resident.

WMH,

WMH,

After deductions for Fed, State, FICA etc. that $10.00/hour employees is only netting about $8.50/hour. I need an applicant that makes a min. of $14.00/hour with a net of about $12.00/hour to make the 3X min. and this assumes they have no children or pets,..which is rare. Most non-union service type jobs in my town pay between $8.00-$12.00/hour.

Roy, we have reached the upper limit of what we can charge locally - if we go much higher we won't have enough of a tenant pool to make good choices. Sounds as if you might have hit your own personal ceiling as well.

Roy, we have reached the upper limit of what we can charge locally - if we go much higher we won't have enough of a tenant pool to make good choices. Sounds as if you might have hit your own personal ceiling as well.

Do a little research first and find out what your market will bear for this kind of unit. Not what you've been charging for 10 years...what are OTHER land lords charging. If you're $200 over market, you won't get better applicants: you'll get zero applicants.

Market research is good for the soul and the pocket book. I was pleasantly surprised to learn about 2 years ago that I was $50 or so under market on my 2-bedroom $450 - $550 units. Had I gone up to $650...no...that wouldn't have helped me because that price range will get you a full rehabbed 2 or 3 bed in a much better hood than mine. Mine are not fully rehabbed, but are clean, safe, and functional. But I did get the $450s up to $525 and the $550s to just shy of $600. I'm full except for one unit, my cheapest, which just came open a week ago. Doing some fix ups now but have an approved applicant ready to move in this weekend.

Review your processes. If you are demanding a voice call, a meeting to get an application; if you don't have a rock solid online presence, you are likely scaring off the prospects with careers(they think that you may be a scammer, or a waste of their time). It is a BIG deal to people.

The losers will continue to call.

Sisco,

Yes, I still demand a voice call to my adverting - it is the ONLY way I can tell the difference between the online 'looky-loos' and the few who are serious about renting a house from me. Prospects who are serious,..will call me. Everyone else just wants to waste my time with stupid texts.

Yes, I still demand a meeting to get an application. I can read someone's body language like a book. Plus, I need to count the number of tattoos/piercings someone has prior to showing a house to them. Tattoos on the neck or private parts,...no way.

No, I do not have an online presence (yet). My Class C tenants do not have careers,...they have jobs which seem to change frequently.

I maybe old school but it still works for me. I don't even own a smart phone either,..just a flip-phone that I can open up and say "Beam me up Scotty"

Still Learning,

3 years ago, I jokingly asked a female applicant how many tattoos she had. She then pulled her blue jeans down to show me the tattoos (tramp stamp) on her lower back and butt! I kid you not. She was proud of her tattoos.

In my market, I couldn't do it. I have a very stagnant population. In my market, the people who can afford a higher rent are going to be homeowners. I don't have a good number of affluent people circulating through my area who will rent because they know they'll be here for a short enough time where it wouldn't make sense to buy.

But that's what we did when we were tenants. We started off renting because we were as poor as churchmice. :) But after we got the jobs stabilized and the student loans paid off, and started saving for a down payment, and were pursuing our advanced degrees, we realized we weren't 100% sure where we were going to end up. Would we stay in D/FW, or would life take us somewhere else? So rather than tie our money up in a house we weren't confident in needing 3-5 years from now, even though interest rates were suddenly at the 5-point-whatever-percent (vs the 8-point-whatever or 9-point-whatever we were used to hearing of), we stayed put in our rental, because all those lost rent-dollars were the trade-off for being able to pull up stakes with 30 days' notice and follow opportunity where it led us.

If you have a significant number of that sort of people moving through your area, you should be able to pull it off, though. You'll also have to balance your rent with the geography of your house (proximity to desirable places), the neighborhood it's in, the amenities of the house itself. Our place was five minutes away from a major metropolitan downtown, five minutes away from his school, and twenty minutes away from another university where he eventually had his day job. It was a wonderfully central location. The amenities-- all we were worried about was having proper washer/dryer hookups, including a properly-vented dryer vent. The location... it was a good block in a bad neighborhood, but the rent was affordable enough to make it worthwhile, because the whole rationale was to save aggressively.

Roy, you made my point. It is your business, so do it so that it suits you.

I found that raising the rent did work on one of my rentals. I wasn’t getting good tenants so I raised the rent and it went. Another option is to reword your ad. Throw in some energy and action words, like “call now” “first come first serve” etc..

one other good measure is if you have say 10 calls and no one comes to look, there’s a problem. (Or whatever number you’ve found for your market). I find that if I have 10 lookers and no applications, I lower the price.