If you’re building a real estate portfolio, self managing the first few rentals is a smart way to learn the ins and outs of your property and the management side of the real estate business. Being hands on will help you build your confidence and strengthen your “property owner backbone” which will lay the foundation for managing future investments OR help you build a team to manage for you.
Self managing doesn’t mean go at it alone! It just means skipping paying a property manager 8-12% of your monthly income. If you’re self managing, definitely use a property management software to do the heavy lifting!
Here are the most important areas to focus on when self-managing and some tools to help you!
Marketing Your Listing
Your property should be listed in a professional manner. Poorly shot cell phone photos or just slapping a listing up on Craigslist doesn’t cut it. Get professional photos taken of the property; bonus to include a video walkthrough and floorplans. This upfront investment will make it so much easier to rent the property for years to come.
Modify your listing strategy slightly depending if you’re renting out long term, mid-term, short term or just by the room, but key sites to advertise the listing on are: Facebook, Zillow and Apartments.com.
You will need to manually post to various social media platforms, but your rental management software will push out your listing to the key online platforms, like Apartments.com.
Tenant Screening
This is the most important step in the process. Proper tenant screening from credit checks, criminal background checks, eviction histories and reference checks are critical to ensuring whoever is living in your property can pay and will be a good renter.
No tenant is better than a bad tenant.
Check out TurboTenant’s application – it has a form which collects the potential renter’s basic information, income verification and rental, credit & criminal history. The application is comprehensive and the best part is it costs YOU, the landlord $0!
This application is the best we’ve seen, but don’t forget to also call those references! You can really uncover a lot by talking with others.
Collecting Rent
Getting your property listed and good tenants moved in is the hard part, but being organized around collecting rent is key to a profitable rental! Chasing payments each month can be stressful and time consuming.
Here are two things to make sure you have set up for rent collection:
- Automatic rent due reminders for your tenants – give them notices to pay rent early too!
- ACH rent transfers – this lets tenants set up auto payments.
Check this out for ways to easily collect tenant payments.
On-Going Management & Maintenance
Avoid at all costs opening up your direct cell or email for tenant’s needs. Instead encourage management and maintenance requests to go through an online portal. This allows you to process the requests on your time and puts a buffer between you and the renters! You’ll likely still need to share your number for emergencies, but we recommend making it clear to tenants how to reach you when they need to.
Consider adding something to your leases or place a note in your rental that says the following:
For life threatening, fire or gas emergencies call 911
For maintenance requests: Fill out this form, someone will respond within 24-hours
For house emergencies (i.e. water or heat outages) call: 123-222-1234
