Finding new renters : how do you do it?

[Sam P.]

I bought my first investment property late last year and now one of the renters is moving out. Looking for advice on how all of you experts go about finding new tenants.

1.Do you use a real estate agent or do it yourself?

2.If you do it yourself, where all do you post? Craig's List? 

3.Do you use Zillow?

4.Do you use apartments.com? Basic listing or premium listing

5.Do you put a "For Rent" up front of your place?

6.Do you use rentals.com or any other website?

[Randall Alan]

In my humble opinion, all you need is Zillow.com.  We literally have to turn our ad of after a day or two because we are inundated with active leads.  

Zillow now charges for their listing service... but it is really cheap in the big picture.  Like “under $5 a day”.  So for $5-10 you are going to have a qualified renter.

When we forget to turn on Zillow and list with all the free websites we’ll still get leads, but like 1/10 of what we get from Zillow.  

So don’t be afraid to use their paid service.  It’s TOTALLY worth it!

In the FWIW department, we use Rentec Direct to manage our rentals, which will “broadcast” (market) our properties to all the websites - in addition to publishing a website for each rental and collects applications for us from the referrals.  It costs like $3-4 a property per month, collects and auto-deposits our rent for no additional fee through a dedicated tenant facing web portal,  plus tons of other stuff.  Worth checking out as well.

Randy