All Forum Posts by: Greg Sawyer

Thank you for your reply Doug. We did end up lowering the rent to $1600 and got a little more traffic, and just now we landed a good tenant and have the deposit to hold. They have a small 8 pound dog and we are making $20 a month off it, which seems like it should work out pretty well. It is funny however, right at the end of this month starting on the 27th we started getting a flood of applicants. Seems people are pretty good procrastinators. We went ahead and did a 18 month lease to help us end the lease in a more favorable time of year and provide some stability on our first rental. On to landing the next!

Thank you for your post, John. I appreciate your perspective on the lead time to fill the vacancy. I know I just have the first time jitters, but we'll learn through it haha. I've read posts on here that said if you don't get much high caliber traffic within two weeks that's typically a sign that your price is too high, so that's what had me thinking that way. Obviously I'm jumping the gun at 1 week, but yay for newbies.

On the pet topic, I actually did quite a bit of research on this topic before making the call and ultimately I didn't find anyone that said, "don't ever". Most said, I didn't allow them at first but now I do, due to 1. Longer term tenant typically (harder to find pet allowing properties), 2. Larger security deposit, 3. Extra rent for the pets, and 4. It increases your tenant pool by 60-70%. I'm going to give it a shot on this one and see if I learn a lesson the hard way. I was super thankful for my past landlords that allowed pets when I was a renter so I know how it feels. Also, Dave Myer posted a helpful article on this topic showing all the data and that pretty much sealed the deal for me. Of course I cant find it now to link here. Sorry.

Thank you again for taking the time to respond!!

Hello All,

First time posting, but I've been reading/listening a lot. Thank you all for all the helpful content. My wife and I bought and fixed up our first property and it has now been listed on Zillow, Trulia, Hotpads, Realtor, and FB Marketplace for a week now. We have had lots of "inquiries" from Zillow, but none that have followed through with answering questions or truly scheduling a showing or anything like that. After 5-6 days we opened it up to allow pets, knowing that we were squeezing our tenant pull down too small and didn't get any real interest for a couple days after that. We were talking about dropping the rent from $1650 to $1600 to drive some interest knowing that we are approaching holidays and the slower winter season, but we just got our first solid applicant last night (Researched comps showed pricing should be: Zillow $1688, BP $1650, Rentometer $1600, two comps in neighborhood with 1 less bedroom are at $1600 and $1550 but they have been vacant for a while). Only down side to this tenant so far is they want to start their lease in January. I obviously don't want to let it sit vacant in December, but so far this is the only solid and responsive applicant I've had. I am meeting them tonight to show them the place and would like to have some ideas on how to approach this topic with them.
1. What strategies could I use in this scenario to encourage them to sign a lease for December?

2. If they absolutely cant start till January, would you ask them to pay for part of the month to help cover holding costs?

3. Should I just leave it up and see if we get any more interest?

4. Should we drop the price and try to drive more interest? Even though if things go through with this prospective tenant they will be paying $1650 and $20 each per month for two dogs netting $1690 (that's very attractive lol)?

Thank you all for your time and insight!