Finding the right tenant for a home is neither as easy as some people think, or as difficult, but many have tripped and fallen for the sake of a little professional help.

Renting residential real estate enables an investor to take advantage of the great principal by which many fortunes have been made, that of leverage, whereby large capital gains can be earned through relative small equity, but necessarily it puts you into the landlord business. And like any business, you have a customer, who is called your tenant.

Experience shows that this is a successful relationship when the tenant receives a well-functioning home at a fair price, and you have a customer or tenant that can be trusted to take care of your asset and pay you on time for the use of it.

Before you entrust anyone with your valuable asset you must be sure you have a tenant who is well and independently screened. How are you able to do that? Professional property managers do this most easily, through a third party credit reporting service, checking personal references, rental history and income, as well as a good dose of real world experience. And they can usually do it a lot faster than the private landlord can do on their own, so that effectively, the placement service costs you nothing. What other professional services can be said to be effectively free?

What if I have a fine home, and I can’t find a good tenant for it?

Marketing is the key here, in addition to professional screening. If your property is broadly advertised, usually at the property manager’s expense – for instance our company has a mailing list of over 900 potential tenants – and it is competitively priced, our experience, is that we will always find a quality applicant within a relatively short period of time, usually less than 60 days.

Minimizing vacancy is crucial to the right management of any residential rental property and we work actively with our landlords to ensure that our rental properties are vacant for as little time as possible, well below both industry standards and what landlords typically manage on their own, through extensive and competitive marketing and careful review of applicants.

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