Rental Property Investor · Houston, TX · Member since 2019 · 141 posts · 48 votes
I am new to rental investing.Currently listed my 1st rental Property on zillow and i am getting a ton of showing request.I donot want all these people to walk through the property due to current Omicron/Covid 19 surge in my city.How can i limit it.Should i ask all these intrested candidates to submit a rental application and screen the applications so i can pick the most favorable ones to come a do a walk through??
@Jeyo Punnakottil you are going to ask everyone to pay $30-50 for a chance to view your house, with no guarantee that a qualified applicant will be selected? Sounds great for you, but you only have one house to rent. That means if 5 of the 7 people are qualified, four of them paid money and will have no chance to rent your property. You could lose good applicants over this policy.
Do pre-screening to limit your showings. We ask four simple questions:
1. Is your income over 3X rent?
2. Do you have any animals, if so describe breed, weight and age?
3. Is your credit score above minimum approval score of 680?
4. When are you looking to take occupancy? (property is available X date)
You are asking the person to self certify income and credit score. Both of these will be verified when they actually apply, so if someone lies or makes a mistake, you can still reject them later. Move in date is critical because I have found people are often looking to move sooner than my property is available. No point in showing to them. Some people ask more questions, but I feel it is comes off too aggressive to give them too many questions.
Another option is stack your appointments in an open house fashion, so they are all coming in the same 1-2 hour window. Have your wife take the kids out of the house. You could also do Zoom. I personally like one on one showings, because it gives me a chance to have a conversation with them. You can find out other information like why they are moving, who will be living there, etc.
I have a listing right now. We have had several inquiries but now showing after 2 weeks. I have two highly qualified prospects looking at it this week. I am confident one will rent it. You don't want more showings, you want higher qualified people and less showings.
You can verbally screen them on the phone to make sure they meet your criteria before they come to the house. Even before covid we put a coded lockbox on the house for showings. We never met anyone at the house, just gave them the code, assuming they met our requirements. Then changed the code after a tenant was selected.
If you're getting an overwhelming amount of showing requests, you're probably priced too low. With that being said, you can require masks at showings or proof of vaccines if you want to keep everyone safe. This will probably filter a lot of people out. You can also hold a one-time open house so you don't have to have an endless amount of showings.
You can try screening over the phone or Zoom or something so that may be an option as well.
@Nick C.Thanks for the advice.But my issue is the house is not vaccant.Me and my family are living there.If it was vaccant i wouldn't mind .That is why i am reluctant to let everyone requesting a showing in.Couldnt i ask the requested people to send a completed rental application and then screen them before showing the house that way i could eliminate a good portion of applicants who donot fit my criteria even before showing?
@Bob Okenwa Its a rental listing and rents are 150-150$ above market rents in the neighborhood.Overwelming amount mightbe a little exaggerated term.I listed the ppty a week ago .I already got 7 showing requests.Because me and my family are living there currently and i have a newborn baby i am reluctant to let everyone come in and see the house .Coulnt i ask them to submit a rental application online and then pick and choose the ones that fit my criteria and let them in for a viewing of the house ?
My criteria is simple.680+ credit score,Income= 3X rent
Or should i call each one of them and do a get to know session either a zoom call or a normal call and figure these things out from the conversation.
I also thought the property was vacant. I was not aware you and your family live there. That changes a lot. Showings will definitely disrupt your household and I can understand why you'd want to limit exposure to your family.
An alternative is to ensure you have plenty of quality photos of everything, and I'd also do a video walkthrough/virtual tour of the property as well and give applicants a link to the video/tour.
I'd follow what @Nick C. mentioned and maybe to a verbal screen off the bat to ensure that the property is right for them and they meet your criteria. From there, you can try to filter out a few people. You can try to get people to submit an application without seeing the property, but the tricky part is getting people to give you an application fee without them even seeing the property in person.
If you believe they are a danger to you and your family defiantly just hold off on showings until after you’ve moved out. Certainly your family’s health is worth an extra 2 weeks of vacancy.
@Jeyo Punnakottil you are going to ask everyone to pay $30-50 for a chance to view your house, with no guarantee that a qualified applicant will be selected? Sounds great for you, but you only have one house to rent. That means if 5 of the 7 people are qualified, four of them paid money and will have no chance to rent your property. You could lose good applicants over this policy.
Do pre-screening to limit your showings. We ask four simple questions:
1. Is your income over 3X rent?
2. Do you have any animals, if so describe breed, weight and age?
3. Is your credit score above minimum approval score of 680?
4. When are you looking to take occupancy? (property is available X date)
You are asking the person to self certify income and credit score. Both of these will be verified when they actually apply, so if someone lies or makes a mistake, you can still reject them later. Move in date is critical because I have found people are often looking to move sooner than my property is available. No point in showing to them. Some people ask more questions, but I feel it is comes off too aggressive to give them too many questions.
Another option is stack your appointments in an open house fashion, so they are all coming in the same 1-2 hour window. Have your wife take the kids out of the house. You could also do Zoom. I personally like one on one showings, because it gives me a chance to have a conversation with them. You can find out other information like why they are moving, who will be living there, etc.
I have a listing right now. We have had several inquiries but now showing after 2 weeks. I have two highly qualified prospects looking at it this week. I am confident one will rent it. You don't want more showings, you want higher qualified people and less showings.
I’ve been in the same boat with 100+ inquiries (Facebook) for a rental property, I told them all I required a completed application (at no charge) before they could see the place. I got about 20 actual applications, only a few of which were even worth considering
@Jared Garrison That is a brilliant idea to ask to submit a no fee application @ first and after i weed out the unwanted and show the property to the qualified i can ask them to submit the application fee only to the highly qualified tenants.Brilliant.This was what i was thinking in the back of my head too.
I require a free application and then a phone call to schedule a showing. I state my requirements in my advertisement (ie must have 3x rent in verifiable income and at least one year at current or previous job); and I state that there will be no showings scheduled without a completed application. This process greatly reduces the number of phone calls for showings, and it has VASTLY improved the quality of my applicants. I do welcome questions, and I post a fair number of accurate pictures of each property. I also make it clear in my ad that we charge a background check fee to interested applicants after showings.
@Jeyo Punnakottil I do something similar to what what @Jared Garrison mentioned and have a pre-screening form. Those that complete the pre-screening and pass initial review (income, credit, etc) are then invited to an open house. I just turned off a listing today after being active for 2 days, had 53 inquires and 21 of those filled out the pre-screening form and several look to be qualified. It's a good tool to weed out the people who my not meet your initial criteria. I also find an Open House is great A) It saves me from making numerous appointments, especially when a percentage wont even call or show up and B) Creates some competition when potential candidates see others interested in the home.
I used to use Google Forms for the pre-screening but recently switched to JotForm and am happy with it. Once you build the form you can just send a link and they can complete it. Here is a what I am using, you can turn on/off the form to accept additional submissions or not, as well has have it integrate to several other platforms such as DropBox, Google Drive, OneDrive, DocuSign and several others. When the form is submitted it goes right into the appropriate folder in my Google Drive as a PDF, nice and easy.
In my market I get a lot of requests every time I post something.
My response to everyone is a very detailed. Spells out all of the rules, expectations, requirements etc. That message will bring the number of 200 people who reached out to about 30. Then I set certain dates and times that I will be there. I don’t cater to everyone else’s schedule. This brings it down to about 8-12 people who actually show up. Then I have a rental application there and charge a fee. This brings the number of actual applicants down to maybe 6-8. Much more manageable and brings a way better pool of tenants.
@Jeyo Punnakottil I do something similar to what what @Jared Garrison mentioned and have a pre-screening form. Those that complete the pre-screening and pass initial review (income, credit, etc) are then invited to an open house. I just turned off a listing today after being active for 2 days, had 53 inquires and 21 of those filled out the pre-screening form and several look to be qualified. It's a good tool to weed out the people who my not meet your initial criteria. I also find an Open House is great A) It saves me from making numerous appointments, especially when a percentage wont even call or show up and B) Creates some competition when potential candidates see others interested in the home.
I used to use Google Forms for the pre-screening but recently switched to JotForm and am happy with it. Once you build the form you can just send a link and they can complete it. Here is a what I am using, you can turn on/off the form to accept additional submissions or not, as well has have it integrate to several other platforms such as DropBox, Google Drive, OneDrive, DocuSign and several others. When the form is submitted it goes right into the appropriate folder in my Google Drive as a PDF, nice and easy.
I like your form, but I would remove the questions around age and number of children. You can't screen based on a protected classes. Any fair housing training will caution a property manager to never ask how many children. You can ask how many occupants or how many unrelated adults.
I am curious, what advantages do you see on Jotform versus Google docs? I have only used Google forms, so just wondering beyond integration with various cloud services, are there other advantages?
Prescreen them and get them to complete a simple prescreening application where you ask the key questions. then pick the ones that meet your criteria (many won't or they won't return the completed form) and then set a time when you can do an 'open house' for those people only. Tell them they need to wear masks when doing the tour as there is a young child who lives in the home. Have your family out with the open house takes place and you stay there to do the tour.
@Jeyo Punnakottil Are you really getting a lot of showing requests? I get a TON of emails from Zillow when I list a property, with the standard "I'd like to setup a showing" wording. A lot of people just hit the button that sends that email on any rental that is in their budget. Of those, only a small percentage actually follow up to schedule a showing, a smaller percentage actually show up, and an even smaller percentage actually read the listing which tells them that I don't answer those emails and they need to text me to setup a showing, and an even smaller percentage than that read the requirements in my listings.
For those reasons, I now usually do showings open-house style, where everyone is given a 30min-1hr window when I'll be at the property. Those who show up can apply, those who don't, well I'm not wasting my time.
@Joe Splitrock thanks for the information on adults/children I never thought of that as I don't base approval on that but on total number of occupants since the rental license has a max per bedroom so I appreciate the feedback.
I switched to JotForm primarily because IMO it looked more professional, both allow your save and print the summitted forms in PDF or Excel, I use the Excel list and only show the names and a signature line for the open house sign in if they are still interested in the property after viewing it. The free version of JotForm allows me to have up to 4 or 5 active at a time, I keep one "master form" saved and then just copy it and rename it to the address that is for rent, rinse and repeat.
I think all previous post are on the spot. From screening and rental price. If you are so new and have no idea of the price or how to screen applicant's min. requirements, I would recommend to talk to someone who have experience and ask if you can "shadow them" in exchange of something you can be of value for them.
It just blow my mind how many people are afraid to make a call today. You will be surprised how many people are eager to have a conversation with you, then you can pick-up their thoughts and learn form them!