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.
Let’s take a look at nine changes you can make to improve the success rate of your rental property showings.
Related reading: Greater Profits and Happier Tenants with Self-Showing Technologies
1. Eliminate Unqualified Prospects
If you’re booking appointments with people who don’t qualify, not only are you wasting your time on that activity, you’re also extending the time on market.
Pre-screen prospective tenants before showing the rental property so that you’re only spending your valuable time with qualified prospects.
Find out:
- When they want to move in
- How long they want to lease
- If they have pets
- If they smoke
- Previous evictions
- Bankruptcy history
- Anything else you need to know to qualify a lead
2. Show on the Weekends
You’ll rent faster if you make your property showings available on weekends and after office hours. Your ideal tenants won’t be available weekdays during office hours, because they’ll be working. Instead, most tenant leads prefer to view properties after work and on weekends.
Our research shows that 26 percent of self-showings happen on Saturday and Sunday. In other words, when tenant leads can pick their ideal time to view a property, the weekend is the top preference.
3. Prevent Double Bookings
It’s easy to double book yourself if you’re using a call center or office administrator to handle your appointments. Normally you’re available on Thursdays, but this week you have a dentist appointment at 2:00. Your call center didn’t see it, or you booked it yourself without looking at your calendar, and now you’re double booked.
Tenant Turner helps avoid that by connecting our booking module to your Google or Outlook 365 calendar. When a new appointment is being booked, Tenant Turner automatically checks for any conflicts and blocks off those times as unavailable in the appointment scheduler.
4. Eliminate No-shows
Not only are no-shows a waste of your time, but they keep the property on the market longer, reducing your profits and creating more work to get the property leased.
Reduce no-shows by sending a text message confirmation to your prospective tenants the day of the appointment. Buildium has found that sending text message confirmations reduces no-shows by 75 percent.
Email reminders aren’t as effective, because they may not get opened, but text messages get noticed right away.
5. Prep the Property
Make sure you get to the property early and make it presentable before your tenant lead arrives.
Walk through each of the rooms and notice the small details:
- Are there any dead bugs?
- Are any of the surfaces dusty?
- Is the air stale?
- How’s the room temperature?
- Any funky odors?
- Is it well-lit — especially with daylight?
- Is there pee in the toilet?
- Any crumbs or dirt left behind by the previous viewer?
- How does the exterior look? Any trash, cigarette butts, or dog poop on the ground?
If the previous walkthrough wasn't shown by you, you might have a surprise or two waiting for you. Don’t get caught off guard! Be sure you have some basic cleaning supplies for the floors, walls, and glass surfaces.
6. Do Your Homework
Make sure you know more than the surface level information about the property, because prospective tenants will want to know certain details beyond what is in the listing.
They’ll ask questions such as:
- When were the smoke detectors last tested?
- Have there been break-ins in the area?
- What schools is the home districted for?
- Is there a bus line within walking distance?
- What amenities are nearby (dining, gyms, libraries, shopping, etc.)?
- How often are the locks changed?
- When is trash day? Does recycling get picked up as well?
When tenant leads ask questions, be mindful of local, state, and federal fair housing laws. As a leasing agent or property manager, you have to be very conscious about how you answer questions.
For example, you can’t say that a rental property isn’t appropriate for young children — even if it isn’t — because family status is a protected class.
7. Close the Gaps
We’re in an era of electronic applications. At one time, you’d have the rental application right there at the property showing and you’d give it to the prospective tenant before they left. Now most applications are done online, creating a gap between the viewing and the application. Just about anything can happen during that time to prevent a lead from taking that next step and filling out the rental application.
Send prospects a text with a link to the online application 30 minutes after viewing the property. That way, they don’t have to Google it, hunt for it, and potentially find a property that’s listed by a competitor.
8. Get More Valuable Feedback
There’s a saying that no one wants to tell you your baby is ugly. If an agent asks, “What do you think?” your tenant lead is likely to say something vague or nice, simply out of good manners. If they don’t like something about the property, you won’t hear it.
But if you text the prospect after they’ve viewed the property, it’s easier for them to be honest and to have that time to give more meaningful feedback. This also gives them some time to process the showing more thoughtfully.
If the property isn’t a good fit for the tenant, use that feedback to take appropriate actions that get the property filled more quickly — whether it’s repainting the rooms, lowering the rent, changing the pet policy, or making some other adjustment.
Also use the feedback to see if you have another property in your portfolio that would be a good fit. They’re clearly a person who is moving. If you have 50 other properties on the market, there’s a good chance that one of them could be what the tenant is looking for.
9. Use the Right Leasing System
Following a lot of these tips can mean creating more work for yourself, unless you have a way to automate the tasks. Tenant Turner’s web-based tenant lead management software works for you 24/7/365, whether you have a dozen units or thousands.
Tenant Turner can optimize your leasing process, from pre-screening to scheduling to automated text messaging and more. Our automated leasing frees you to grow your business and turn more properties faster — 50 percent faster, on average.
Learn more about how to make tenant turnover a breeze — download our Property Management Checklist.
