Is DFW rental market slowing down

[Vishal Bansal]

I've a duplex which is newly painted and repaired two months ago but it is still empty. The unit size is 4 bed and 2 baths, I've reduced the rental price from $1700 to $1500 in last 2 months. Apparently, there is lot of interest but the applicants either have very bad credit history or don't make sufficient money to pay the rent. I wonder if the DFW rental market is slowing down and there other landlords facing this kind of issue or its more of a property manager issue.

[Marcus Auerbach]

I would suspect the quality / condition is not where it needs to be. The quality of your applicants will always match the quality of your property. I have seen that over and over again.

You can learn a lot from the kind of applicants you attract. Our observation is that once we turn a listing live on Zillow in the first 12 -24 hours we get a lot of highly motivated people with a very high sense of urgency: they need a place now and often have been turned down before because they did not qualify. As time goes on you see more better qualified individuals, they are not as much in a rush.

There is a seasonality to the rental demand and it's normal to slow down in fall, but you should be able to fill a vacancy in a week or two. We currently take listings of Zillow after about 2 days, because we already have 100+ inquiries to process. In fairness, we rent fully remodeled units and they stand out as Milwaukee has a lot of old inventory.

You have about a million people in Fort Worth, some napkin math tells me every month about 10,000 leases get signed. If you are not one of them, you have to ask what do they have that you don't? Maybe time to do some mystery shopping..