Our Property Management Insights

Rental property showings are one of those things that everybody thinks they’ve mastered, but few truly do well. It takes more than a friendly agent with a magical personal touch to make a property visit successful. You might be surprised how much faster you can fill a vacancy by making some key adjustments to your property showings.

Showing a rental property can be risky. Agents are sometimes targeted by criminals that see rental showings as opportunities. At a showing, there’s usually only one person and an empty property, creating a prime scenario to take advantage of that person or the property.

When I first started as a landlord, I remember being surprised how empty and dirty and dusty a vacant home is. It highlighted the feeling of risk of not having someone in there, and the worry about paying the mortgage. What if the hot water heater breaks while the house is vacant and I don’t know about it? New floors aren't cheap!

"We could not have grown the way we have without Tenant Turner."

The problem with property leasing is that it all seems to happen in a black box you can’t get into. You post a listing on Zillow. Does it go live? Maybe. It seems like you aren’t getting a lot of rental leads. Is that because your paid ads are all wrong? Maybe. What’s going on with the viewings? You’ve had plenty of inquiries, but the property is still listed. Where’s the breakdown occurring? Who knows? How great would it be if you could actually see what’s going on with each of your properties — really see what’s working and what isn’t, all along the path from beginning to end?

Brace yourselves for more listing site shake ups We all felt the splash when Zillow Group began charging for single family listings in 2019, and over the course of a year became a fully monetized platform. It was a tough pill to swallow for property managers who relied on Zillow, Trulia, and Hotpads as their primary source of free leads. Luckily, there was a hero waiting in the wings: Zumper to the rescue! Buttressed by their unique partnership with Facebook Marketplace, leads still flowed without paying for listings.

True confessions moment: how many times have you let a call go to voicemail, because it was a property owner you didn’t want to deal with? You knew why they were calling — they wanted an explanation why their property still hadn’t been filled — but you just didn’t have the energy for that conversation.