When you purchase a rental property, setting accurate rents is the most crucial step to keeping your rental operation running at a profit. As a landlord, you don’t want to outprice your local market.
Ideally, you would like your rents to fall into the middle range, where most people can afford to rent from you. Mid-range rents are the best way to ensure a steady flow of prospective tenants when your property is available. At the same time, you want to set a rate that reasonably covers your operating expenses – mortgage, taxes, insurance, repairs, vacancy, and property management costs.
Confusion and Frustration Over Rents
As a self-managing property owner, you may find that determining current rental rates in your area is a time-consuming and overwhelming task. Searching through rental listings across various platforms and posting sites can leave you with a pile of useless data. You need to know how to analyze and apply what you learn on those sites to set your rent competitively and profitably.
When setting rents for a new property, many property owners skip the review and keep their rates the same as what the previous owner charged. Without a sound reading on the marketplace, these owners run the risk of losing money and eventually even losing the property because its cash flow doesn’t support it.
Understanding Local Rent Rates
There are online tools you can use to get a better understanding of the range of current rents in your area. Many provide a free trial, so you can test the product to get familiar with how the reporting works and the form in which data is provided.
Rentometer.com is a robust rent rate reporting tool that provides data for markets across the United States. Rentometer earns high marks for its user-friendly interface – you don’t need a degree in data analytics to understand the information it provides.
Rentometer’s edge is timely information. It collects data from the rental marketplace every single day – confirming new listings, filled listings, and verified lease rates—a win-win for any property owner who needs comprehensive and accurate data.
The reports give you a breakdown that compares your property to others in your reporting area within a given timeframe. You set the radius – anywhere from x to x – and date range for the search. The report compares your rent to other rental properties in the specified area, and rates it as “good,” “reasonable,” or “too high.” You also see the historical trend for comparable properties, a summary of the properties searched, average rent by the number of bedrooms, and how your rate compares to others in the area.
With all of this data, you can set your rental rates with confidence that it’s right for the market at this time.
Rentometer Makes it Even Easier to Get Rent Data
Rentometer takes one step further to give you the most critical information quickly. The Quickview feature (on your home screen) cuts right to the chase to recommend the most competitive rent amount to charge.
Using Quickview allows you to skip the full report if you don’t need the extra information in your search. It shows you where your rent falls among other rents in the area, the sample properties reviewed for comparison, and a suggested rating of good, reasonable, and too high for the rates you are charging.
You can check out QuickView here.
Pricing Right and Staying Full
From the QuickView screen, you can easily access the full report, to take advantage of all the other details we mentioned above if you have a Rentometer Pro account. The Rentometer Pro account comes with different reporting levels depending on your report volume. QuickView is unlimited access with all Pro accounts.
Monthly allows you to run 10 reports while the Basic allows you 1 year of access. If you manage or own a large number of properties and need more reports monthly, you can also check out the Pro with 200 reports.
Once you start pricing your rents appropriately, earning more, or staying full due to serving a higher volume of people, you’ll realize how essential this tool is to run your rental business profitably.
With Rentometer Pro, having unlimited access to QuickView on any address is one subscription you won’t mind having.
Check out the QuickView today to see how you can quickly and accurately set your rental rates.
With Rentometer Pro, subscribers get full access to: