Gone are the days of families driving by on a weekend looking for a “for rent” sign or students walking on their way to school and looking at a property and wondering if they can come through for a showing. Signs usually erode over time, get knocked over, vandalized, fall apart, and this reflects poorly on your property. Although some Landlords like to take on the responsibility of renting out their house, they need to go about it the right away. Here are some tips on how to market you rental property to find a qualified set of tenants:
1. Pictures
Pictures are literally worth a thousand words. If you are just taking pictures from your old flip phone and posting them on the internet, then you have major problems. Landlords need to take high definition, quality photographs of each room from multiple angles and lighting. This also includes the exterior and backyard of the property. We usually take 100 photos of the property and only post are best 10 on the website or classified ad sights including deleting 90% of photos and editing the photos to make the house look its best. Pictures are your first impression of the property. If you cannot handle this as an owner, then you need to hire a professional photographer who can accomplish this task for you.
2. Video
Videos follow in the same footsteps as pictures. Several short clips of the main areas (kitchen, bathrooms, etc.) need to be stitched together, along with the great photographs, to create a video that can be hosted on YouTube and embedded on all the social media and classified ad websites to give more information to a prospective tenant.
3. Description
Most of the time Landlords post very short ads on classified websites. They usually put up a few low quality photos and have a description that says “beautiful family home renovated call John between 5-8 at 555-555-5555 for a showing.” This is not enough. A heartfelt description of the kitchen, bathrooms, common areas, bedrooms, exterior, parking, appliances and upgrades need to all is laid out in plain English when advertising. The description will limit the “noise” or those perspective tenants who are just kicking tires on your property.
4. Social Media
Social media websites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn, etc. need to be harnessed to successfully engage with prospective tenants. Your social media needs to be streamlined with services such as Hoot Suite, to make your social presence on all platforms efficient. Social media will provide your potential customers with another method of contacting you, as well as providing your ads or website with links back to your website which helps out with search engine optimization.
5. Be Responsive
You can have the best photos, videos, descriptions, and social media presence in the world. If you are not responsive with your prospective tenants, you will never rent out your property. Setting up a specific time frame for tenants to get back to you is a definitely a bad move. Whether it’s an email, text message, phone call, voice mail, or a message on a social media platform, they should all be responded to within 6 hours, or 12 hours if it was sent overnight.
There it is! Renting out your property is not rocket science. If you are not able to successfully complete these five steps, then you need to re-evaluate your priorities and hire a company who is able to accomplish this task. If you are looking for a rental agent in London Ontario, then you have come to the right place.