Investor · Milwaukee - Mequon, WI · Member since 2010 · 5k+ posts · 7k+ votes
I start to pay a lot more attention to seasonality of the rental demand and I am wondering what the Milwaukee BP comunity is seeing. Looking back this year typically I always had one single family house for rent, either because we just finished rehab or because someone is moving. Most of my advertising is on craigslist and I started seeing demand go up quite a bit in spring, typically I would get about one email a day. Not much of a surpirse demand kept going up as days got longer and in June/July I was seeing sometimes 5 emails a day and had a home rented within a week. I ended up renting a house that we just started demolition on - talk about a hot market. Now here we are in September and things are slowing down fast - I am down to 3 emails a week. What are you guys seeing?
Investor/Property Manager · Suwanee, GA · Member since 2014 · 93 posts · 40 votes
11y
I'm in Atlanta, and the market here is very seasonal. Towards the end of August, activity dies down for the year. Not completely, but significantly. Especially in the suburban areas where people are more organized and try to settle down before school starts. We have also structured our leases to be 14 to 17 months and most tenants don't mind.
I wanted to mention also, that instead of advertising on Craiglist, where you get probably some of the worst prospects, try Postlets.com. It's free, and it will spread your ads to Zillow, Trulia, Hotpads and a few other engines where the quality of the prospect is much higher.
Johnson Creek, WI · Member since 2015 · 42 posts · 11 votes
11y
I think it would be just like the real estate home market, people are tucking in for the winter. I would think that only really good deals on rent would get a bunch of action but then you have the problem of renter filtering to get the renter you want as opposed to filling the property.
Rental Property Investor · Algonquin, IL (Chicago suburbs) · Member since 2014 · 155 posts · 76 votes
11y
Hey Marcus
The same conditions are present here in Chicago for myself. June/July are my prime months to fill my vacancies and I even structure my leases to renew during this period even if it means structuring the new lease to a term of say 16 months vs 12 or 24 months. It has been my experience most qualified tenants do not have an issue with this approach.
Investor/Property Manager · Suwanee, GA · Member since 2014 · 93 posts · 40 votes
11y
I'm in Atlanta, and the market here is very seasonal. Towards the end of August, activity dies down for the year. Not completely, but significantly. Especially in the suburban areas where people are more organized and try to settle down before school starts. We have also structured our leases to be 14 to 17 months and most tenants don't mind.
I wanted to mention also, that instead of advertising on Craiglist, where you get probably some of the worst prospects, try Postlets.com. It's free, and it will spread your ads to Zillow, Trulia, Hotpads and a few other engines where the quality of the prospect is much higher.
Investor · Milwaukee - Mequon, WI · Member since 2010 · 5k+ posts · 7k+ votes
11y
@Brian Karlow that's a great point and I have tried it before with Q4 leases and structured them so they come due in spring or summer - I had the same experience as you, no issue for the tenants - it's also in their best interest to move in spring or summer: nobody in his right mind volunteers for moving during the winter in Wisconsin. Thanks for the reminder, it's been a while since I had to do that.
@Marina Shlomov - great advice, it makes perfect sense - I'll definitely try that tonight. Craigslist has spoiled me a little bit the last year, so I never had a reason to explore something else. My natural target audience is paying premium rents for nice homes and are somewhere in the area between blue collar and white collar. I have noticed that professional pictures make a huge difference if you want to appeal to a certain audience, portlets.com probably allows for a nicer presentation if I remember correctly. Now I know what I am going to be doing after dinner...
Investor/Property Manager · Suwanee, GA · Member since 2014 · 93 posts · 40 votes
11y
I am glad I could encourage and motivate to try something different. Good luck and keep me posted if you see a difference in leads and if your conversion rates increase,
Investor · Milwaukee - Mequon, WI · Member since 2010 · 5k+ posts · 7k+ votes
11y
@Marina Shlomov I set up a postlet yesterday night and found it super easy to do. They use a lot of checkboxes which makes it very searchable for aplicants looking for certain criteria.
I am big about great pictures and I dont have much of this particular property (didn't stick to my process, we were moving contractors out same day as tenants moved in), but this weekend it will be vacant and I will bring the fisheye and get some more material for postlets. They also have a video walk arround ap which I will definitley try. Thanks again for the idea, I'll let you know if it makes a difference.
Investor · Milwaukee - Mequon, WI · Member since 2010 · 5k+ posts · 7k+ votes
11y
I would like to hear from my fellow investors in Milwaukee or Wisconsin how they are seaing seasonality. How big of a swing do you see? How is the market for you right now?
Investor · Milwaukee, WI · Member since 2014 · 811 posts · 420 votes
11y
I rented out 4 units in Milwaukee all between January and March of 2015. I had no issues at all. I put the units on Postlets and would get at least 10 plus inquiries per day.
Investor · Milwaukee - Mequon, WI · Member since 2010 · 5k+ posts · 7k+ votes
11y
Postlets works great and I have received 7 inquires in the last 24 hours. I have pretty high qualification criteria and we will see how the quality is, but from what I can see in the inquires I expect quite good. This makes it a clearly better choice compared to craigslist. I have started playing with facbook boosted posts and ads and I am finding this the least productive. Yard signs always yield a ton of calls, but very random quality and I have stopped using them alltogether. Talking to a few people in the last days it seems like October is generally busier than September.