In the world of real estate, good tenants are worth gold, and much like gold, they are equally as hard to find. Unlike prospecting, though, this is the moment where the job of a landlord/property manager only begins. The loss of good tenants means the loss of income as the property lies vacant and additional time and money need to be invested in advertising and screenings. Here are a couple of strategies that should help you to attract valuable tenants and keep them for as long as possible.

Identify a Perfect Tenant

Knowing who you want to find will make your search considerably easier. Some of the most common requirements are:

• Stable employment
• Has never been evicted
• Pays on time
• Communicates malfunctions immediately
• No pets

Create an Engaging Marketing Campaign

Now that you know who are you looking for, it is time to create an engaging and effective marketing campaign. If you are, for example, targeting young couples soon to become family, you can enrich your advertising with slogans like “close to downtown”, or you can point out the fact that your property lies in vicinity of a school or a kindergarten. Also, you can offer your existing tenants a reward if they refer quality candidates.

Be Honest

If the potential tenants have changed at least a couple of properties, expect them to very well-versed in property seeking and looking for the potential drawbacks. If you try to push the plain facts under the rug, you will only appear untrustworthy and lose valuable source of income. Instead, try to build an honest relationship from the get-go, address the potential problems and offer a solution. Keep in mind, though, that you’ll need to keep your promises as soon as possible.

Offer Incentives

These would be the small perks that make tenants’ lives much easier. For example, you can offer them to pay the rent in two rates, or give them an option to use some of the online rent payment services that reward tenants for regular payments. All these things cost you virtually nothing, and can do a lot to help you rise above the competition.

Be a Good Landlord

Once you finally find your ideal tenants you have to resist the urge to micromanage their lives. Also, don’t forget that nobody’s perfect and that some flaws and mistakes are to be tolerated. As long as you keep these things in mind and do your best to maintain friendly, open, and professional relationship, your tenants will be willing to overlook some of the mistakes on your behalf. Just do your best not to become too friendly with them. Friends are notoriously hard to evict.

Keep up With Repairs

Be aware that the problems will come knocking at the door sooner than later – there’s simply no way around it. The best thing you can do is to take a proactive stance and prevent potential malfunctions with regular maintenance or be quick to react at the first sign of trouble. Keeping some money on the side for such occasions is probably the best way to approach this problem.

Help Your Tenants to Move Out

Every story has an end, so there’s no reason to break the good relationship with your tenants when the moment arrives when they need to move on. If you go out of your way to help them move out and use your connections to help them find new property you can only earn a good reputation in the real estate circles, and probably get some good recommendations.

Starting a real estate business is not as easy as some people like to assume – it requires a lot of patience and hard work. The key area where you need to put your efforts in is finding and retaining quality tenants. We hope these few strategies will help you to accomplish this difficult task.