Vacancies are expensive for every rental property, so if your property isn’t renting right away, you may be asking yourself why. If you’re not getting a lot of prospective tenants who want to come and see your property, you may be wondering what you’re doing wrong or not doing right.
Back in 2002 and 2003 when I first started in the real estate industry, you just put a sign in the yard or an ad in the newspaper to market your rental property, and that’s all you needed to do. Today’s tenants are very different. My early days were 17 years ago, before anyone had started doing online advertising. But today, the internet is huge. People have very short attention spans, so you need to show that property quickly and answer the phone quickly. You especially need to make that house look good.
If your property isn’t renting as quickly as you’d like it to, see what you can do to increase interest with the following tips.
Professional Photography in Marketing
At McCaw Property Management, we use professional photography. High quality photos will make the property pop. The photographers go out and take a triple exposure photo of the property, which takes out the shadows and brightens up the property, providing the effects that you want.
When tenants are scrolling through Zillow and they’re clicking through each property listed, you want them to stop clicking just long enough on your page so they learn more about it. You want your listing to stand out, and that’s where professional photography can help. Photos taken with an iPhone may look okay, but the advertisement with professional photography is the one that is going to stand out.
Including Videos in Your Listing
We also like to do videos because YouTube is huge and almost all perspective tenants are using it. We are going to do videos with our marketing plans, but we aren’t just going to shoot a plain video because it’s very difficult to search for just videos of houses when you’re on YouTube. You want to take a video of the property, use professional photography, and in the description of the video you are going to put information such as: this is a 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom home in the Fort Worth, TX 76177 zip code area.
This is important text to include because when someone is on the internet and they are searching for a home in a specific neighborhood, your property will immediately pop up. Making these videos is not a particularly difficult process, and it amazes me how few people are doing this for their properties.
Be Responsive to Tenant Inquiries
Tenants are different now, and they expect to hear from you right away. You have got to show houses fast, answer calls fast, get the house in top condition, and make it pop. If you don’t, those high quality tenants are going to move onto another listing. This is the internet world, so you have to go get it and market your property.
It’s not all about price and product anymore. Now, it is about promotion as well.
If you have any additional questions about how we can help you rent your property quickly, please contact us here at McCaw Property Management.