Questions About Renting Properties
Once you have found and purchased a property that you plan on using for rental income it is important to find a good tenant for your property. Also, it is wise to determine how the property will be maintained. If you are a handy person, you may want to take care of maintenance and upkeep and repairs on the property yourself. Eventually, you may find that maintaining your property, especially if you have more than one, can be quite time-consuming so another option is hiring a property manager in Arizona.
How Do You Handle Maintenance?
Anyone who owns a home knows that at some point, something will break or clog at the worst possible time. One of the most important things you must keep in mind when hiring maintenance people is that you need them to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, including nights, weekends and on holidays.
No one likes to wait for a repair so it is important that your renter have their needs taken care of as soon as possible. Dave Zundel, of Great Homes, recommends that you hire handymen and contractors that are licensed, bonded and insured. Although it may seem economical to hire lower priced workers, as the old saying goes, you get what you pay for, so be willing to pay for good work.
Avoid hiring people without checking into their backgrounds; you want to take the safety of your properties and the renter into consideration before sending someone of questionable character into the home. Also, smaller maintenance providers are often unable to offer guarantees and warranties on their work or on the products they use.
Hiring a property management company to take care of your maintenance issues is another option. These companies have staff and established maintenance crews that will be ready and able to assist you and your renters at any time of the day or night.
How Do I Find a Good Tenant and Keep Them?
Now that you have a rental property, it is time to find a tenant. There are several things that will help you find a good tenant. First, try to make your property or properties as appealing as possible. Even if your property is located in a less than perfect location, that doesn’t mean that it has to look less than perfect.
Second, make sure that you price the property right. Just a few dollars too high can cause people to avoid your properties leaving it vacant for more days than you would like. If your price is right, you have a better chance of attracting the more desirable tenants.
Third, have an extensive and vigilant screening process. In many cases, difficulties with renters could have been avoided if the investor had been more careful about who they were renting their property to.
Try to find out as much about the renter as possible before signing that lease.
How Do I Choose a Property Management Company?
If you do decide to work with a property management company, look for a company that has been around for a while and that has a good reputation in the industry. Many companies, like Great Homes, are investors in the real estate industry as well which makes them more familiar with the ups and downs of dealing with renters.
Make sure that the company that you choose has a good marketing staff and that they have a good customer service staff. These are the people who will handle any difficulties that your renters have so they should be kind, courteous and helpful.