Today’s rental market is much more competitive than in the past. While it’s a property manager’s market, that doesn’t mean you can take your tenant leads for granted. Renters know they need to act quickly, and you need to get the best tenants possible. That means you don’t have the luxury of losing prospects to other rental properties.
Quality tenant prospects are the first ones to go off the market, and it’s frustrating to lose top quality tenants to other properties. You can reduce the number of lost prospects if you know why tenants choose other properties over your own. Here are the top reasons we’ve discovered as we look at the data.
Lack of Instant Communication
Prospective tenants expect immediate responsiveness, and it’s not a minor issue. If you want a chance with a new lead, you’ll need to respond to an inquiry within one to two minutes. You read that right—minutes, not hours.
If someone submits an inquiry on Friday night, you can’t wait until Monday morning to get back to them. They’ve spent the entire weekend researching other properties and sending out dozens of other inquiries. By Monday, they’ve forgotten who you are and have already been talking with other properties that utilize automated lead scheduling software.
As a property manager, you may have business hours, but when it comes to someone’s personal life there are no business hours. Tenant leads are most active looking for properties during off hours, which makes it difficult if you’re only available during business hours.
Renters know that the nature of the market demands that they keep moving forward and submit applications like crazy. They’ll often take the first property that they can get, even if it isn’t on their shortlist.
The sooner you can follow up with a prospective tenant and get them scheduled for a showing, the more likely you are to move forward with an application and get them to sign a lease. Immediate responses keep the best quality candidates in your pipeline. The slower your response, the lower quality your pool of applicants will be.
Tenant Turner lead scheduling software automatically responds to tenant inquiries for you, so that you can provide that vital responsiveness 24/7. You can be confident that you’ll never lose a prospective tenant due to a slow response time.
See how Tenant Turner lead scheduling software saves you time
Lack of Transparency
Your top tenants want to know what the restrictions are on a particular property — whether it’s a pet policy, smoking restriction, or income requirements. A lot of places don’t disclose that kind of information on their listings, which can eliminate excellent tenant prospects. Here’s how.
Rental applications are often used to quickly and efficiently disqualify applicants that don’t fit your requirements. If they smoke, have pets, or don’t meet income requirements, they’re immediately sifted out.
But what if a pet owner is willing to part with their pet? If you aren’t transparent up front about your requirements, they won’t communicate that important information to you.
If you want to find the right tenant, it’s essential to tell them from the start what defines the right tenant. For example, perhaps your property will accept someone with a cosigner, but you require a 3x income. If a prospective tenant goes through the process and applies without a cosigner, they won’t qualify and you’ll miss out on them. But if they know up front that they need a cosigner, they can take care of it before they apply.
Likewise, we’ve noticed that many prospective leads are willing to make lifestyle changes in order to move into their preferred property. When you state those restrictions from the start, they can assess what changes they are willing to make before they apply.
Move-in dates are a great example, as well. Renters usually want to start their new lease just as their old one ends, so they aren’t paying rent for two places at the same time. But if they know ahead of time that the move-in date is a month before their current lease ends, they may be willing to pay rent on both for a month — especially if they have time to prepare.
The more transparent you can be from the very start, the more opportunity you give quality tenants to decide what they can be flexible on. Better yet, you give them the opportunity to work with you so that you can secure an ideal tenant.
Poor Communication
Poor communication plays a major role in losing quality tenants to other properties.
Prospective tenants want to rent from people who are easy to work with, highly responsive, and enthusiastic about renting to the prospect. That boils down to good communication. Your communication to tenant leads should make it easy for them to take the next step towards signing the lease.
A great way to communicate with your prospects is to remind them about their scheduled showing and request a confirmation. Not only does that help eliminate no-shows, but it helps nudge your prospective tenants to keep moving forward through the process.
Your leads may be caught up in the busyness of work and life, and it’s easy to forget that they made an appointment with you — especially if they’ve scheduled several showings. You don’t want to be the one showing they forget about.
Timely communication does two things to help you get those quality tenants across the finish line. First, it creates a path of least resistance. If you’re the one property that keeps sending helpful text reminders to their phone, you make it convenient to confirm right there and then. It reduces friction and it keeps you top-of-mind.
Second, friendly and personable reminders establish a personal connection with your leads. They become more familiar with you, they think of you more often, and they feel like you know them better than other property managers do. It creates a personal preference in your favor, and it establishes a bond that you can continually reinforce throughout the process.
Good communication also helps to keep you top of mind. A prospective tenant isn’t only inquiring about your property — they’re checking out as many properties as they can. They could be communicating with 15 or 20 different property managers, and your property will be lost in the noise unless you establish a quality ongoing connection.
It can sound like a lot of extra work to excel in communication — especially if you have several vacancies, each with their own long list of leads. To lease correctly and quickly, there are a lot of tedious tasks that have to be done. And sometimes it’s all for naught, because you lose a prospect or someone turns out not to be qualified. But if you don’t do it, the leads that are qualified and interested won’t make it to the next stage.
That’s why automated communication is so effective. Lead software like Tenant Turner can take those tedious tasks off your plate by providing automated communication at the right time and in a personable manner.
See how Tenant Turner software helps automate tenant communication
Overpricing
For years, the rental market didn’t change very much, but right now it’s a very dynamic landscape. Pricing is continually changing, and that means property managers need to stay on top of the current market like never before. While rent has been escalating at an unprecedented rate, early signs show that the market may be leveling off and even preparing to drop.
Use tools like Rentometer and Zillow’s Zestimates to be sure you’re pricing your property in line with the current market.
Limited Showing Options
Self-showing options are convenient and remove common barriers such as time. Many prospects are uncomfortable meeting someone they don’t know because of health or other concerns, and many are only available to see the property outside of typical business hours.
Make it as easy as possible to view the property. If availability is limited due to calendar conflicts with the tenant lead, you could lose them before they have the chance to fall in love with your property.
Mediocre Advertising
Good advertising is critical to turning over your inventory fast. But if your advertising isn’t optimized, your ideal tenants may never see your property listing. Here are a few tips to ensure you get the best bang for your buck with property listings.
- Syndicate your listings across multiple channels.
- Use tenant lead software that helps you protect your listings with watermarks.
- Track your results by measuring key performance indicators.
- Don’t advertise on one site. While Zillow is the top website for property listings, there are plenty of other great sites as well.
- Use high quality photos of the property, both interior and exterior.
- Don’t skimp on the blurbs — make them descriptive and enticing.
With Tenant Turner, advertising your rental property is a snap. Discover more about the best websites to advertise your property — download our advertising guide today!
Land Your Ideal Tenants
Even though today’s rental market favors property managers, it’s just as competitive as ever for those who care about signing quality tenants. In this fast-paced environment, tenant leads are making their decisions at lightning speed. But if you eliminate these common reasons that renters choose other properties, you’ll begin to win more and more high-quality tenants.
You can start by ensuring that your rental listings are optimized for the right tenants. Download Tenant Turner’s Advertising Your Rental Property Guide for 2022.
