Tag Archives: bad tenants

College Students: The Expanding Market for Property Managers

If you live in a city or town predominately inhabited by college students and teens, you may feel as though you have difficulty finding tenants for your rental property. However, this market holds tons of opportunities just waiting to be taken!

In regions with large colleges or universities, there are thousands of students waiting to escape the dorms and live in real apartments and houses; this is where you come in! Targeting your rental property to the college student market can prove to be highly successful if you go about it correctly. It’s normal to feel a bit worried about renting out your property to a group of people who are so young and not fully aware of everything they need to do, but that’s where the lease agreement comes in. Make sure you outline all things that you don’t allow, and enforce a fee if the rules are broken; college students hate additional fees, so it’ll be an extra incentive to be on their best behavior. Also, you can require a guarantor, maybe a parent or guardian, that way you can guarantee you won’t have issues with your tenant.

The college market is also great because college students do not have a lot of requirements or specifications about where they want to live. As long as your property has a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen, you’re good to go! College students are also good tenants because they can give you a realistic estimate about how long they plan on living in your property because eventually they’ll need to graduate or just relocate in general.

The fall semester for most college students starts in August, so if you do want to expand your market now is the time!

 

When Tenants Go Sour: How to Avoid Bad Tenants

Here at Tenant File, we’re constantly stressing the importance of finding a tenant that is a perfect fit for your home. While there are certain steps you can take prior to renting out your home to them (check out our video on tenant screening here), can you guarantee that your tenant won’t go bad? Realistically, you can’t, so you need to be alert and keeping your eyes open for signs that your tenant may not be as good as they seem. Having a bad tenant can make the rental process immensely difficult and costly for you, so you need to make sure you don’t end up with one!

For starters, don’t rush the process of screening your tenant. It’s important to make sure that you have legitimate information that checks out. You should definitely require proof of employment from your tenant and verify it to make sure it’s not falsified. If you skip this step, you may end up with a tenant that you think is a high earning executive, when in reality they’re unemployed. Missed or late payments are also a huge red flag your tenant may be going bad; if they stop paying out of nowhere without speaking to you about any issues they might have, it may be time to have them move.

A huge thing that some tend to overlook is making sure everything is in writing. The lease contract needs to be sure to have every single aspect of the rental agreement being made in it, not just a general overview of the terms. If all the terms of the agreement are in writing, it’s clear to your tenant what they can and can’t do in your property. Having a fully stated agreement also makes it easier for you to point out certain terms your tenant is breaking and provide concrete reason to have them evicted.

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