Using Padmapper.com to Determine Market Rents

So if you’re an independent landlord, how do you determine what the current market rent is for your units?  The historical rents might be a good guide but those could be artificially low especially if you have long term tenants and no recent rent increases.  Local classifieds and online rental listings sites are a good source but they can be painful to sort through. 

Enter padmapper.com.  This is a site I recently came across.  Padmapper was designed for apartment seekers but they also offer apartment listing services for landlords.  The creators of the site were looking for a way to make the typical apartment search less daunting, by providing a platform to make listings easier to track, filter and visualize geographically.  Aside from their proprietary listings linked from Padlister.com, Padmapper also links to listings from Craigslist, Apartments.com, Rent.com and many other smaller sites.  The result is a great website that is easy and fun to use.

As a landlord, you can use a site like this to see what the going rates are for similar properties in your neighborhood.   The many search parameters allow you to drill down quickly and the map feature makes it easy to navigate.  You can search by city, address or zip or just scroll around the map to see what is available nearby. 

Now when your leases are coming up for renewal or a tenant moves out, you have a convenient resource that you can use to maximize your gross rents. 

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Brent Hall provides real estate sales, marketing and advisory services to investors of multifamily property, individuals and firms involved in rehabbing and developing residential real estate and those looking to buy or sell personal property in Chicago.

Brent Hall is a broker associate with Jameson Sotheby's International Realty.