How to Find a Tenant For Your Rental Property

Now that you actually own the property and have it ready to be rented out, you need to find someone to put in there. You need to find a tenant. You need a tenant to start paying rent so that you can make those mortgage payments (oh and pay your property taxes and the other expenses). This part can either be really easy or extremely difficult depending on where the property is located on this planet.

How can you find a tenant for your rental property? Let’s look at how simple this whole process can actually be…

You need to look for tenants before you even buy the property.

I highly recommend that you figure out what the real estate market is like before you even buy the rental property. You can check your local real estate listings website or magazine, check online at Kijiji, or just use your common sense from what you know about the area. An area with many professional buildings around will likely be easy for a landlord to fill it up. A place in the middle of nowhere might be a bit of a struggle. You need to search around to see if there are any interested tenants before you even buy the property since you’re investing so much of your hard earned money into this source of passive income.

A buddy of mine took this a bit further. He actually found a tenant before he even purchased the property. Now I wouldn’t recommend this at all. The beauty is that he mitigated his risks with his rental property since he knew he would have a tenant the day he got the unit ready. It’s necessary to look for potential tenants, but please don’t sign any legal agreements until you get the keys to the property.

Decide where you’re going to put up your ad.

I wanted to test the waters by putting my ad on Kijiji to see what the reaction would be like. I put the ad up for my condo before I went to sleep one night. When I woke up in the morning I had five emails and I ended up booking three viewings for that same Friday. Not bad for a quick ad I designed over night.

You need to figure out where you want to put your ad. I personally felt that Kijiji was the best place because it’s FREE and many of my friends have had success with finding tenants on there. It worked out for me. You can try one of the other websites for selling stuff, eBay, your local newspaper, or you local real estate listings website/paper. I just advise that you always test the market out with Kijiji.

Design the perfect ad.

Truth be told, my ad was very basic. I actually texted a buddy who had recently rented out his unit and asked him kindly if he would send over his template. I blatantly stole his template, modified it a bit, added a few pictures, sold the location, and threw up the ad on Kijiji to see what would happen. I wasn’t sure what to expect. This is was in the middle of July. I sort of wanted to rent the place out by August. I also sort of wanted to stay in the unit until the summer ended. I was torn as to what to do. I was pretty confused about what I would do next.

There’s a secret to designing the perfect ad. You need to find ads for units in your area and see what they look like and then base your ad on what seems to be working.

It’s smart to use the same selling points. I saw what was working for other ads and applied it to my ad.

Hopefully the location sell itself. I must admit that my condo was in a pretty hip location (I take full credit for the area becoming hip). I didn’t have to work as hard to sell the location. Instead I just listed the name of the area and what’s around. I also took pictures of the whole unit, the balcony, and the view from the unit. Pictures are a must! Don’t be lazy. Bust out your cell phone camera and take some pics of the unit.

It took me about 20 minutes to finish up my ad and have it online. This quick ad helped me find a tenant within a week.

Make it easy for interested candidates to contact you.

I gave my Gmail email which I check on my cell phone. It was easy for interested candidates to reach me and for me to respond. As simple as this sounds, many new landlords mess this step up.

Create an open house day and schedule in all of the potential candidates.

I went with my three leads and setup an open house day for that Friday. This all depends on your schedule and what your candidates want to do. I found that Friday works because most people leave work early and they want to get their house hunting done around the weekend.

That’s what you have to do to find a potential tenant for your rental property. I didn’t get into the idea of screening the candidates because that’s another topic for another day. At this point you should know exactly how to setup a rental property as passive income and what it takes to find tenants. You’re almost done. Did you see how easy that was?

(photo credit: Paragon Apartments)