Tenants are the key ingredient to a landlord’s income. Without tenants, there’s no rental income and your property will be left vacant. Landlords can decide to operate their property as a private letting or go via a letting agent to find tenants.
If going down the letting agent route, its important to select the right letting agent and compare agent costs & ratings.
Whereas some landlords to avoid the letting agent fees, may opt to go down the private letting route. This will require the landlord to manage the property themselves, including finding tenants.
Methods to finding tenants vary, some are expensive, quick, provide quality tenants and some enable you to pinpoint what type of tenant you want to find.
Below are some tips on how to find tenants for your rental property.
1. Find Tenants With A Shop Window
An old school way! Get a card, write down you’re looking for a tenant with some details about your property, stick it in a shop window and wait for the calls to roll in.
This is a very cheap way of finding tenants. Usually the shop owner will charge about £5 a week for your card to be posted. This amount is far less than you’d expect to be charged by letting agents.
You’ll receive calls from all sorts of people, after all the people using your local shop are all from different walks of life.
Therefore you need to vet out the wrong sort of potential tenants, if you have existing tenants already in other rooms. The last thing you want is to mix up tenants that go to bed early to get up for work the next day, with hard partying students!
You’ll also need to handle the calls and appointment arrangements yourself, which can be time consuming.
2. Word Of Mouth
If you’ve got a property that already has some tenants, one way to find more tenants is to ask them if they know anyone looking.
By asking existing good tenants, you’ve already sort of got a recommendation for that person.
Plus as the tenants know each other, there’s likely to be less disputes and therefore the amount of times you have to settles arguments is likely to be very low!
3. Ask Your Local Letting Agent
Asking your local letting agent is a tried and trusted way to find tenants.
They’ll likely have a backlog of tenants searching for a rental property.
You can stipulate what type of tenant you’re looking for. Perhaps you’re looking for a professional that’ll fit in with the tenants you have already in other rooms of the property.
Maybe you want a longer term letting for an entire property. In this situation a family could be your best bet, seeing as they’re less likely to uproot often.
Your local letting agent will charge of course. Tenant finding fees vary. Some agents charge a % of the rental income over the course of a tenancy, while others may charge a fixed fee at the start of the tenancy.
If you feel you need more support as a landlord, you can also ask your agent to take up tasks such as rent collection, property maintenance and providing a guaranteed rent policy.
4. Online Letting Agents
Online letting agents are increasing their share of the rental market. With no overheads of a high street premises, usually lower fees are offered which so far going down well with landlords.
If you’re interested in getting a traditional or an online letting agent, you can view fees and performance of agents using our comparison platform, Rent Round.
5. Students
If your property is located near a university, then attracting students is a no brainer.
A good way to find student tenants is to ensure you’re posting your property vacancy on student notice boards and making use of student accommodation online platforms, like Student Accommodation UK.
Students attend universities well away from their hometowns and as the number of student’s year on year is increasing, it’s providing a healthy pipeline of tenants for landlords.
However notoriously students don’t take the best care of properties they live in. We’ve heard stories of students treating their accommodation as a makeshift cricket ground, piles of rubbish held up in the kitchen and let’s not get into some of the horror stories we’ve heard about bathrooms.
So you’ll need to set aside a higher proportion of your income to manage some of the maintenance that will accompany running a student rental property.
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