4 Tips for Finding World-Class Tenants for Your Rental

by Brandon

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4 Tips for Finding World-Class Tenants for Your Rental

I once bought a rental house that came with an existing tenant. Things were fine for a few months — but then she started paying her rent late.

Then she stopped paying entirely.

She decided illegal drug use was more fun than paying rent!

Soon after, she was evicted — and she left me thousands of little cockroaches, a death threat note, and the worst smell you can imagine.

Sometimes being a landlord is such a joy.

On the other hand, I’ve had dozens of incredible tenants who pay rent on time, take great care of the property, and are helping me build wealth and financial freedom in a spectacular way.

So, how does someone find more of the great tenants and fewer of the bad ones?

If you want to succeed as a landlord, you must do just that. You must learn how to discern which are world-class tenants to avoid renting to scumbags.

How?

Well, today I want to share four tips for attracting word-class tenants.

4 Tips for Finding World-Class Tenants for Your Properties

1. Think like a funnel.

In business, a sales funnel is the idea that you want to get a lot of leads coming in, knowing that only a few will ever buy from you. For example, 1,000 people might see an ad for a pair of socks in the newspaper, but only a few dozen of those will go to the store, and maybe just a couple will buy a pair of socks. That’s a sales funnel, and it’s found in almost every industry — including landlording.

Your job as a landlord is to use this exact funnel to attract tenants — a lot of them.

Think of it this way — if you get just one person to call about your vacant property, what’s the chance they are going to be a great tenant? It’s kind of a gamble. But what if 1,000 people called about your property. Could you find one that is going to be perfect? I would hope so — or else you probably need to move towns.

The point is, the more people you can put in the top of your funnel, the more picky you can be to get the one ideal tenant at the bottom.

So how do you do this? You need to have an advertising system that’s going to bring you qualified leads. This could be Craigslist, Zillow, Postlets, the newspaper, a sign in the yard, a post on Facebook — or, if you are like us, you could do ALL of these. The more marketing we do for tenants, the greater chance we have of finding that needle in a haystack.

(Click to read on BiggerPockets…)

About Brandon

has written 199 Awesome posts in this blog.

Brandon Turner (G+) is the BiggerPockets.com Senior Editor and Community Director and owner of RealEstateInYourTwenties.com. He is also an Active Real Estate Investor (Flips, Apartments, and Buy-and-Hold), Entrepreneur, World Traveler, Third-Person Speaker, and Husband. Come hang out with him on Twitter!

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