Why My Rental Is Still Vacant?

Rental vacancy is a real headache for any landlord. Ideally, you’ll want at least a 90 % occupancy rate for your rental property. However, realistically, this may not always be the case. If your property has been on the market for a very long time and is still vacant, it’s time to find out what’s wrong.

Rent Is Too High

There are times when the rent is high because property taxes have gone up. There are also times when the rent is high because a landlord raised it to make a lot of money –that’s just the reality of being a landlord. However, when the house you own is found in a highly competitive area, tenants will have lots of options, or rather other houses, to choose from; if your unit is priced too high, people will just look around at the market and see what they can find that fits their budget.

So, if you don’t want your house to stay vacant for a very long period of time, you better lower the monthly rent –even if it means lowering it by $ 100 or $ 200. If you’ve set $ 3000 as the monthly rent for your property, for example, lower it to $ 1800 or $ 1700. You’ll only be losing out on $ 200 or $ 300 per month of potential rental income, compared to $ 3000 for each month your house sits unoccupied.

Now, if your rent is high because of changes in legislation, one of the best strategies to attract tenants is to offer a two-year lease to offset the high cost of the rent.

Ineffective Marketing

Marketing doesn’t have the same value it had long ago. Today, its importance is highlighted everywhere; it’s a trend right now. Competition in the market is at its highest level and if you want your business to survive, you need marketing.

Marketing is not just an art; it’s the art of getting noticed. The rent of your property is as important as your marketing; you need to reach people and you need them to hear you out. If you want to attract tenants for your property, you need to connect with them first and marketing is another word for connecting with clients. However, if you are not getting any proposals or inquiries on your rental property, it might be time to re-evaluate your marketing strategies.

What makes a marketing effort effective or ineffective is the extent to which it impacts the results of the product or service being marketed – it’s that simple. So, if your rental property still seems to be invisible to people out there, it means you’ve fallen into one of the following marketing traps:

• Your marketing was improperly or poorly targeted; the target audience is the heart of marketing and failing to do so can generate displeasing results.
• Marketing language that isn’t clear and concise. Or, marketing language that isn’t targeted – in marketing, you don’t talk to men the same way you do with women, for example.
• Using the wrong media. In this contemporary and highly advanced world we are living in, you can’t attract tenants by only using emails or newspaper ads.
• Ads that have no appealing content. “House for rent” is too typical and is not enough to attract tenants. You need to be more creative.
• Poor research. Any marketing done that doesn’t know beforehand the target audience or the proper channels to market the property is predicted to fail.

When it comes to marketing, the most useful piece of advice is not to create a flashy website or smart Facebook posts, but rather to create a message that will encourage customers to act in ways that will improve your rental business.

Finding the Perfect Tenant

There are some common guides most landlords use to filter targeted tenants and they are:

• A decent credit score
• A decent rental history – did they pay their past landlord on time?
• A decent work history

Sometimes, landlords prefer tenants who are married compared to single people while others settle for working people compared to part-time or full-time students. According to real estate experts, being a picky when you have to rent a property isn’t recommended at all.