Renting Property With Confidence – A Simple But Necessary Guide
Property is often among the most valuable assets that people own – and if you own enough of it, very real business opportunities come to pass. But renting your properties or leasing them appropriately can be much more difficult to manage than people give it credit for, despite the pernicious belief that landlords mostly sit around and do nothing.
Renting a property with confidence, then, requires a careful approach, preparation, and also the ability to manage your level of risk. This is why so many leasing businesses and rental departments use CRE software to accurately track and manage their clients, as well as their income/expenditures and reporting necessities.
While this is a career that most people tend to learn ‘on the job,’ as it were, there are common principles that everyone can use when managing clients, be that leasing to a business, renting to tenants, or simply allocating a timeshare into the building itself. In this post, we’ll discuss a few measures to use and how to avoid the common pitfalls of such a career.
With that in mind, let’s get started.
Understand The Scope Of Your Tenant/Commercial Client
It’s important to understand the scope of your tenant. What business do they run, or what job do they have? How long do they plan on living there, and to what extent will a rolling or fixed-term contract be necessary?
What provisions are essential to them, such as bringing pets into the property, or in commercial terms, what noise levels may they need to make in order to establish their production process and hours of operation? Asking these questions can help you understand if a client is right for you, to what extent they are suitable for the space, what accommodations can be made, and what their plans are while there.
Renting Property: Secure Your Property 
It’s important to make sure that the property is as secured as it can be ahead of time. This gives you the chance to prevent break-ins, squatting, damage, vandalism, and the need for other reparative measures while your tenant is using the space.
This might involve investing in the home by installing privacy fencing, gates, intercoms, fire doors, and more. After all, no matter who is using this space, this asset is still your investment and so making sure that you invest in the long-term soundness of the property at large will limit how many micro-investments you may need to make along the way. This can also relate to utilities, such as the HVAC installation of such a space.
Inspect Semi-Regularly
It’s good to inspect the property semi-regularly, not so often that your tenant feels as though they have to tiptoe around you, but not so little that the space could look vastly different between visits and damage can accrue without your knowing. From furniture rearrangements to installations made by the tenant and approved by you, taking a careful hand into understanding this process can make a tremendous difference going forward.
Utilize An Agent As Appropriate
Utilizing the services of a real estate agent can help you collect rent, process maintenance requests, and generally ensure the profound day-to-day upkeep of such a building and such tenants is appropriately handled. The more you can do that, the better, and the more insightful you’ll be in the long term.
Keep Communication Open
It might be true that you’re a relatively hands-off landlord with all of the aforementioned services to help manage your day-to-day, but it’s never good to be a totally absent landlord unable to respond quickly and carefully to new information should it come along. Even something as simple as a tenant asking for certain provisions, to alter a contract coming up, to discuss problems with the property, or to talk about the action they’re taking with the council or with your lease terms requires your diligent attention.
If you can be ready for that, and make sure you keep open channels of communication while diverting less appropriate discussions to the proper channels such as the aforementioned letting agent, then you can strike a healthy balance between the management of your business and the reality of owning property that serves as the anchor point for someone’s life or business.
While it’s important to recognize that working as a landlord is no easy task, with these efforts and precautions, you will make the best of it. Over time, you may be able to expand and extend your portfolio, using the lessons learned here to achieve greater success.
