If you have thought 'I might like to rent my home' then you know it brings with it a lot of questions.
In this video, Matthew Whitaker will walk you through some of the initial items you should consider. What's up everybody? I'm doing questions owners ask. And today's question is "What do I need to do to rent my home?"
Rent Ready
So the first thing I think you need to know about is you need to make sure that your house is rent-ready. Some people think that the bar to renting their house is like less than selling their house. To some degree that's true. I mean, the bar for a resident to come rent your house is definitely less than if they were buying a house. But there is still some kind of basic things that I think people overlook when they're trying to rent their house.
- One is it needs to be clean
- Second, it needs to be safe
- The third thing is it needs to look good
People tend to think they can just rent a dirty, tired, old house, and that's just not necessarily the case. I mean, certainly, if you rented it for almost nothing, you could probably get it done. But the point is if you're going rent it for anywhere close to market value, it really needs to meet those three criteria. So first thing you need to do is make sure the house is rent-ready.
Know The Market
Next, you need to make sure you understand the market rate of the house. How much is the house going to rent for? There's two quick ways you can kind of know this, and the first one is understanding what's going on in your neighborhood and knowing if there are any other rentals there. You could certainly find this online. You can pull-up certain websites like Zillow or Trulia and see all of the houses in your neighborhood that are for rent. Also, I think that Zillow Zestimate, this is number two, Zillow Zestimate, well, some people are so frustrated by it. You know, to some degree it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. When a resident pulls that up and they see that, "Hey, Zillow thinks it should rent for this," then sometimes it really does just because that's what they think it should rent for. In other words, Zillow sometimes sets the market.
The Application
The third thing I think is to market your home, show your home, take applications in a proven application. This is probably the hardest step, I think, in the process because this takes a little bit of expertise. If you've never done this before, it can be difficult:
- Knowing where to market your home
- Knowing how to show your home
- Understanding what to look for on a resident's application before you approve somebody to live in your home
But that's kind of the next step in the process, is marketing the home, showing the home, getting applications, and approving an application.
The Move In
The last step is the move-in. The move-in process is very important. You want to basically account for what your house looks like before somebody moves into it. The last thing you want to do is have somebody move out and swear that the house looked like that if they damage something when they move in. So making sure, people do this with pictures, videos, anything you can do to kind of make sure you know exactly how that house looked or you can tell somebody exactly how that house looked before a resident moved in, I think that's very important. So this is Matthew Whitaker with GKhouses. I'm doing questions owners ask, and that was "What do I need to do to rent my house?" Thank you.