Managing rental property is no cake walk, especially when you are the only one managing all your rental properties. It takes a lot of time and money to check if your rental property is in the right shape, perform tenant screening, and collect rent on a monthly basis. These are a few responsibilities you have to perform as a landlord. When you have fewer rental properties, rental property management is doable, but it is harder when you have many. In this article, we will first go through the responsibilities of a rental property owner and then understand how getting into a contract will help a rental property owner.

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What are the responsibilities of a rental property owner?

You lose money every day your rental property is vacant. But finding a prospective tenant is a critical process. With the help of a rental property management contract, you can be at ease while the professionals find the right tenant for you. There is a whole step by step procedure that is followed to find prospective tenants, that include:

• Pre-qualifying applicants when they contact you

When you are in search for a tenant for your rental property, you need to take them through a fair yet discerning screening process. To ensure a fair screening process, you can consider having a scripted call or an email. This script will contain questions you want your applicants to answer.

• Meeting the applicants

After you have screened the right candidates for your rental property, you need to meet them in person to know them better. So, the next step is meeting the applicants. This is an important step which can’t be skipped as it gives you a clear idea whether or not the applicant will be a responsible tenant.

• Accepting and analyzing applicants

Once you meet the applicant in person, you can make up your mind if they are going to be your tenants or not. Though it is completely your choice, you need to treat all applicants equally and use the same criteria for all your applicants.

• Check for references

Before accepting applicants as your tenants, you need to conduct a complete background check. This may include talking to their past landlord, employers and other sources. Information such as whether the applicant has any past criminal records or negative financial or rental history helps you to be sure whether the person who will be renting your property is trustworthy.

While trying to gather information about your applicant from their employers, you may face some problems. So, you need to carefully construct your questions in the right way. Remember that you should only be verifying the information provided to you by the applicant and not invading their privacy in any way.  

Also, you must be careful about impersonators. The applicant may give you a reference of his friend as his past landlord. You need to watch out for bluffs like these and carefully structure your questions while having a conversation with the references provided to you.

• Go through their credit score

Credit score information is a much-needed information during tenant screening. This information helps in giving you a clear picture of the applicant’s payment histories and bankruptcies. If you find out that the applicant has a low credit score, then it indicates that the applicant owes more money than his income or doesn’t make credit payments on time. However, having a low credit score should not be the sole criteria for disqualifying an applicant. A low credit score can also be a result of unexpected medical expense. Or maybe your applicant has just started building his credit score.

Apart from choosing the right applicant for your rental property, you need to collect monthly rent,  inspect your rental property before, during and after the period of tenancy, and maintain your rental properties.

How getting into a rental property management contract will help you

All these responsibilities are too much to be handled by a single person. You need more manpower to manage all your rental properties. Hiring a rental property management firm is the best thing to do when you have a lot to manage and lack the manpower to handle it. Getting into a contract with a rental property management firm will help you perform all these responsibilities.

A rental property management contract is signed between the landlord and the rental property management professionals. This could be an agent or a company hired to run as well as maintain the property. The contracts include basic information about the tenant such as information about the parties involved, legal description of the property, and terms of financial tracking to name a few. As the contract involves a rental property management professional, you can now relax and let the professionals handle all the work. If you are looking for a rental property management firm in Edmonton, contact us at Rental Advisors. Rental property management contract at Rental Advisors helps you with:

• Finding prospective tenants
• Screening rental application of prospective tenants
• Maintaining your rental property
• Collecting monthly rental payments from tenants
• Inspecting your rental property during the tenancy period

Let’s work together to ensure a good rental property management experience. You love your property and we love everything about property management. It’s a perfect match!