There are 3 primary reasons and by taking a few critical steps you can cut your vacancy rates in half or more.  Read on if you are a property manager or landlord and don’t want to fall into the trap so many other property managers have in today’s declining real-estate market.

1. We’re in a recession. Despite our government telling us it was over in 2009; it’s not for most of us, especially those in the real-estate or property management business.  Because times are tight right now owners are skimping on maintenance such as putting off the new paint job or new carpet until next year when times are better.  That line of thinking will ensure that next year will be no better.  The maintenance has to be done eventually anyways, and if the money to do it can be scraped up to repair the problem today, the outlook for tomorrow will be much better because your vacancy rates are going to go down.  Fact is, tenants do shop and it is more of a tenant’s market today than ever, so if there is a better house available (that doesn’t need new carpet for instance), you are going to lose that tenant.  If you manage your own properties make the decision to keep up the maintenance, and if you manage somebody elses properties, provide them this compelling data so they will.  Pay specific attention to these items, in order of importance:  Exterior paint, front yard landscaping, front door and entryway, living area & kitchen.
    
2. Who is your customer? Running a property management software service we hear from a lot of property managers, owners, as well as tenants.  What is the #1 gripe from tenants these days we’re hearing?  “We’re not treated with respect”.  Property managers often forget that their customer is the tenant.  It can be easy for us to get wound up in the screening process and be so strict, for the protection of the property, that we reduce our friendliness to the prospective tenant.  Make your customer love you and they will not go somewhere else!  This starts with the application process, showing the property, and the continued relationship.  One huge mistake in this process we see time and time again is making the tenant wait on your schedule to see a property.  If a property cannot be shown until tomorrow and they can see a property today from your competitor you just lost a customer and have done a disservice to your client, the property owner, by further increasing their vacancy rate.  I feel it’s important to have the staffing available to bend over backwards for tenants and treat them as equals, or better yet, in the same way you would treat a property owner looking for a manager, in the utmost respect and courtesy.
    
3. Do it better. Great property managers and landlords today are providing services to their tenants to make their lives easier.  Make your tenants fall in love with you by providing them something that makes their lives easier and most importantly, something they won’t get if they move away.  Be creative, every market is different; however, here are a few examples that work in almost every market. 
    

   Offer automated ACH. Automated ACH not only makes your tenant’s life easier because the rent happens automatically, but it also increases your retention rate and level of importance for a tenants monthly expenses.  It’s also been observed that an automated payment isn’t as emotionally stressful to a tenant as if they have to write a check each month for what is often their largest monthly bill.
   
   Offer a tenant portal. 80%+ of your tenants today have online access and that number steadily grows every year.  Tenants check their bank balances online, pay their bills online, and merchants have embraced online tools to save them time and money along with providing an extra convenience to their customers.  These same tools are available to landlords now, and if you aren’t providing them and your competitors are, guess who’s making their tenants more happy which is equating to longer term tenants and lower vacancy rates.
   
   Keep up on maintenance. Even when occupied it’s important to inspect and maintain a property.  More often than not your tenants are not cleaning the carpets or painting the walls.  If the home gets run-down, even if it is the fault of the tenant, they will feel less happy with the home and always be eying a fresh new place to live that is being kept up.  There’s an emotional factor to a clean, maintained home that keeps tenants longer.

Vacancy Data Source:  http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/hvs/historic/files/histtab1.xls

The article covers six important items and only briefly mentions the very best property management software (Rentec Direct) <grin>, but he makes some excellent points.  We have independently polled and asked thousands of landlords what is important to them.  Visit our main website to review what we have consistently found to be the most important tools for landlords.

This is great news because it provides one additional identifying component when screening your prospective tenant.  Because criminal records can be returned with non-exact matches, when a photo is included and it matches the person or thier ID you know with higher certainty the record is valid.

To see what a sample report with an image looks like, click the sample report image to the right.  It will expand and show you what all your future criminal background reports are likely to resemble.

First and foremost it’s absolutely vital you know the criminal history of your new tenants.  Do you want the liability of renting to a convicted felon in your property?   A proper background screen will give you address history for your new tenant, which is good for verifying the legitimacy of their application as well as knowing just where to run criminal background reports on.  Did you know the typical “nationwide” criminal report is simply a compilation of that particular screening agencies information?  More often than not it seems, those nationwide reports do not include any records.  That’s why you see “no data for subject” so often when running them.  For this reason it is absolutely vital to run the background reports based on the address history of the subject.

The second thing I want to know is has this tenant ever had any judgments, liens, or bankruptcies.  If they rented in the past and defaulted or caused a hardship on a previous landlord they most likely have a judgment against them if the landlord turned them into any form of collection.  If bankruptcies or liens show up in the tenant history it also gives a good example of how responsible they have been with their bills in the past as well.

There are a couple really cheap supplemental reports which are optional, but often a good idea.  Performing a SSN validation usually only costs a couple dollars and confirms this person is who they say they are.  A good SSN validation will also include complete address history.   You can also search the federal government maintained terrorist database if you are so inclined.

Running a credit report used to be on my list of must have reports; however, rules have recently changed which prevent private landlords from running credit reports.  If you have the ability, I find verifying a tenant’s current bills, including their new rent payment, vs their income is useful to see if they can afford to rent.

So why is it that 90% of landlords aren’t properly screening their tenants?  It usually boils down to choosing the wrong screening vendor, or product.   From my research, most landlords run what is usually referred to as a “nationwide criminal” report because it sounds like it searches the whole country, and usually is fairly cheap.   The unfortunate part is, these reports often do not do an exhaustive search of every state’s records and therefore do not have complete or accurate results.   They more often than not are very old databases as well.  It is vital to know your tenant’s address history so you can choose the correct databases to search.

The second important thing to know is if the records you received valid.  If you receive a hit on a statewide search, it is absolutely critical to check with the county in which the record originated to ensure validity.   In fact, a landlords use of non-public information is dependant on this step.  You must verify a record with the county prior to using the information as a basis for rejecting an application.   Your screening agent should be able to do this for you.

Finally, one last critical point to address.  Run background reports on every applicant.  This includes husband, wife, roommates, co-signers and anyone over the age of 18 who is going to be living in the household.  Most landlord charge an application fee per-person to cover these expenses.  It is completely expected nowadays.

Rentec Direct now offers complete tenant screening integrated into our already popular property management software!   We provide you by default our Intellisearch query which, at no cost to you, searches your prospective tenant’s address history and tells you which reports you need to run to get accurate results.  We back it up with statwide criminal comprehensive searches, county level queries, judgement and liens searches, as well as an array of important supplimental searches.  We also are offering 30% off regular pricing which makes Rentec Direct’s tenant screening the most economical choice available!

It’s super simple too!  Just login to your Rentec Direct account (if you don’t have one, signup now for free in less than 2 minutes).   If you are using Rentec Direct for online applications, when you receive an application, simply click the ‘Background Check’ to initiate the background screening tools.  Otherwise, click on Reports, then Tenant Screening Reports to initiate a new report or view your existing ones.

Not only is it simple, but it’s very inexpensive.  We’ve reviewed many tenant screening outfits, and being landlords ourselves we’ve discovered the pricing is prohibitive in most cases to do comprehensive criminal background checks on every applicant.  As landlords, we typically charge a $25 application fee and that never seemed to cover the costs of a decent criminal background report.  NOT ANYMORE!  Rentec Direct has teamed up with the nation’s more comprehensive supplier of criminal reports, and formed an exclusive arrangement to provide these reports to Rentec Direct users at a substantial discount.    For example, a complete nationwide super criminal search, which includes sex offender registration for all 50 states, costs only $10.00*.

More information and sample reports are available over here.

*Pricing accurate as of the date of this post.  Pricing could vary in the future.

The REI Brain has recently completed a review of Rentec Direct as well.  The video review is attached here, and the complete review can be seen here.

Special thanks to Trevor and thereibrain team from the Rentec Team.

We designed Rentec for individual property owners and investors who own and manage their own properties. Rentec direct is designed for you, the investor who may do property investing full time or part time and you own from one to one hundred properties.  The owners and designers of Rentec Direct are landlords too and we know what it is like to manage a handful of properties without the need or expense of paying a property management company.  We found the need to create Rentec Direct because there was no software application available that fit our needs fully as landlords.  As a current or potential landlord yourself, you may have experienced the same.

Rentec is built from the ground up to meet the needs of landlords managing typically between 1 to 100 properties.  Very rarely do we see a landlord or small team managing a larger set of properties, so we are able to fine tune the software to work best for this niche.

Another driving factor for us in offering Rentec for free is that generally we feel life has treated us pretty darn good.  I personally have the best family one could ask for, great friends, and live in beautiful Southern Oregon.  All this came from a lot of hard work, the help and support of our community and country, and perhaps a little luck.  One of our goals with Rentec is to give something back.  There’s thousands or more man-hours put into developing Rentec Direct, and we give away most of that for free.  It’s our way of contributing back to the landlord and investor community and saying Thank You in general.

Rentec Direct is FREE for individual landlords.  There’s no risk to try it out, so take it for a spin today.