The Landlord Lens - The Secret to Attracting Quality Tenants

Episode Date: February 8, 2024

In this episode of Be A Better Landlord, Seamus and Krista discuss the importance of property listings and how to improve your chances of finding qualified tenants.Fair Housing for Landlords self-paced course:➔  https://bit.ly/Fair-Housing-For-Landlords5 Tips for Taking Amazing Property Photos:➔  https://bit.ly/3NYwskd Send us your listing photos to us for a free critique:➔  [e-mail] 

Hi, I'm Seamus, joined by Krista, and we're here to make you a better landlord. Krista, a question we get from our community is how do I get more leads for my vacancy? When you hear that question, what do you think of? Like, first reaction, how do I get more leads for my property, both? Better listing. If you have a compelling listing, then people who are online who might otherwise be distracted by various pop-ups, other properties, are going to be in click through and hopefully see themselves living in your property and immediately submit some kind of information to learn more. That makes a lot of sense. Let's dive into then what makes a good

quality listing. What's the first attribute that comes to mind for you that makes a great listing? As a writer, I'm a bit biased. I think the description is one of the most crucial parts. So when you have a good description, that also includes having a really compelling headline, you need something that's going to grab people's attention, especially since the average attention span is only about eight seconds long, if you're lucky. So you want something that communicates what your property has to offer in a really short way, so people are intrigued enough to click in and learn more. Any examples you'd share? Let's say I have a three-bedroom single-family residence that I'm trying to rent out. Hit me with a headline. Ooh, maybe three-bedroom single-family home at

1-2-3 Lucky Street near downtown life. Love that. All right, so we have a great headline now, catches people's attention. Let's jump into the actual description itself. What should be in that description? So there's going to be the standard information you would think to include, like, how much monthly rent is. But you should also pick out details that you think someone would really want to know. So consider what would you want to know about a property if you're looking to move in? Well, square footage, number of beds and baths, any kind of amenities, the parking situation could be good. If you're close to public transit, that's a good thing to note, especially in specific locations like college towns, consider what tenants in your area are looking for and try and model your listing

appropriately. So keep it short. Bullet points are going to be your friend here because you want it to be really readable from a glance. Include all of those details as succinctly as possible to show off your property without lying or being hyperbolic. That makes sense because you certainly don't want people to express interest and become a lead for your property and then find out that some element of it is not as advertised, right? It's going to waste a lot of your time. It's going to waste their time as well. Absolutely. And to that end, do you want to guess what people often miss in their property listing? The price? Good guess, but no. What they usually miss are things like pet rules and smoking rules. Little details that can really help a lead understand if they're going to be a good fit for your

property and disqualify themselves if they're not. So have things like if you allow pets, say something brief about the number of pets allowed if there are any kind of restrictions, and what kind of fees that the tenant could expect if they pursued your property. Similarly, if there are HOA rules or other things that could get missed in your lease, this is a good chance to introduce them to tenants before anything is even signed. You bring up a really good point because I think most people fixate way too much on the number of leads and not nearly enough on the quality of those leads. Listing description can go a long ways to making sure that, like you said,

people are self-selecting out when it's not a good fit with them. It's going to save you as the landlord a lot of time. It's also going to make it so that you are able to give adequate amounts of time and energy to those high-quality leads that have a great chance to becoming your future tenant. Absolutely. Another way to do that is to have some kind of prescreener in the mix. So when I'm talking about a prescreener, that is a set of questions that you send out to interested leads before they submit an application. So no money is changing hands. You don't have to worry about the Fair Housing Act in the same way.

We can touch on that a little bit later. But this set of questions should give leads the opportunity to once again disqualify themselves if it's not a good fit. So asking things like, do you plan on smoking in the property? Do you have pets? How many people are going to live with you? What's your desired move-and date? All the details that you would need to just qualify a lead should be gleaned from that prescreener. And if you have a company like TurboTenet that you're working with, it can be done automatically, which is really nice.

You took the words right out of my mouth for a shameless TurboTenet plug. You create your listing on TurboTenet, we then syndicate that property out to all the major listing sites, and the average landlord is going to get 28 leads back on their property alongside prescreeners so that as a landlord you're spending the majority of your time dealing with leads that have the best chance of becoming a tenant for you eventually. I love it. I will ask, just in case people don't know, can you tell us more about what syndication means? Syndication is the process by which you've created your listing on TurboTenant. we then share that automatically out to the major listing sites.

Sites like Apartments.com, Realtor.com, Redfin are all going to have your rental. And as prospective tenants, see that they can express interest. That then comes in the form of lead right back into term return. Love it. Keeps everything organized in one spot. I'm a little biased, but I think that's genius. Exactly. Going back to the property description,

I know sometimes getting the creative juices flowing that all of us are like you and writers is a little bit challenging. So one tool that I've found to create a really good property description is some of the new latest AI tools out there, whether it's chat GPT or it's barred from Google. It's really easy to go to those services completely for free, type in those details to make sure you also add the address, and ask for a property description that includes local transportation and local amenities to the area. What's going to happen is Bard is going to spit out a property description that you can take

a lot of inspiration from when creating your own. And so that's a really productive way to use some of these latest AI tools to enhance your property description and not have to worry about things like spelling, the punctuation, the grammar, all those things that trip me up on a regular basis. Yes. And what I love about that advice is that you can go through, make sure that everything is looking good, looking accurate. You're going to know your property better than the machine. And you don't have to spend as much time writing. So you can then revisit the. fair housing component of listings. So as you're reading through what Bard has spit out, you want to make sure that there are no references to the seven protected classes from the Fair Housing Act. That way, you are in the clear. You're not going to risk getting charged up to $16,000 for your first offense. And you can feel really confident about what you're putting out there. That makes a lot of sense and is super, super important. And our experience from working with our

community at TurboTenet, we know that most fair housing violations, don't come because people are being malicious. It comes from just lack of information as to what to do and what not to do. Yeah. As an example, one of my favorites to pull out of the bag, do you know the difference between using the word smoker in your listing versus smoking in which one can cost you big time? I'm about to know in about 30 seconds, you tell me.

Absolutely, you will. So if you say no smokers, you are banning someone based on what is considered a disability through the eyes of HUD. You cannot do that. You cannot say no smokers at your property. That usually gives people pause because it's a very common thing to require. What you can do instead is say no smoking. You are prohibiting the act, not the person.

And that has you covered in terms of fair housing. For people that hear those sorts of examples, much like I did and think, oh crap, there's probably a bunch of little things that I'm getting wrong. Do you have any suggestions for resources? Absolutely, I do. At TurboTenet, we saw that this was a huge area of confusion. and we built a course for our landlord community called Fair Housing for Landlords. It goes through an overview of what you need to know about this crucial act to maintain compliance,

save yourself money, and avoid the wrath of HUD, which is pretty scary. All right. So we've talked about the value of a great title, the value of a good description, and then we've also talked about syndication to make sure that you're getting your property out in front of a lot of renters, as well as making sure you're compliant with fair housing. Are there any other tips you have for individuals that want to know how to get more high-quality leads? Yes. Focus on your pictures too. You should have at least 10 pictures. Organize them in a flow that mimics how someone would walk through the property, right? So start at the first room, move through, make sure that you have wide shots that are well lit. No spinning ceiling fans, no wonky line work. Don't try and use a fish eye lens. That's bad news. And make sure that you are communicating the space. as it actually exists. Don't get fancy and try and Photoshop things in. Just have a nice, clean space,

at least 10 pictures that show all of the key features, including any kind of amenities or shared spaces like community centers that you might have. And then make sure that you are looking through them and that you are not appearing in the reflection anywhere. That is a huge one. Oftentimes, if you are appearing in a reflection, some of our syndication partners will just exit immediately. you will not have that listing shown and they will not tell you why. So it's important to just keep that in mind as you're filming. Those are some great tips. I think this would be an incredible opportunity for anyone in our community

that wants us to do a teardown of their property listing to actually send that to us at education at turbotenet.com. And we'd be happy to do a little bit of a teardown and even record it and send it back to the community so everyone can learn from some of the common mistakes we see from listings. That sounds brilliant. Well, thank you for sharing some of those tips as to how to get more leads

and what makes a great property description. For our community out there, if you have any other questions, please leave them below in the comments. TurboTenant is the all-in-one platform for landlords to manage their rental properties. From vacancy to tenancy, we have you covered with industry-leading tools

and expert advice. Landlord better from anywhere for free at turbotenant.com.