Tips for Renting Houses

Video Transcript

"Tips for renting houses. If you have a place to rent, the most important thing to do right off the bat is get involved with a rental company or a rental agent in your area that is going to be able to put your rental unit out on the market and get a good market price for it. This is very quickly and easily done by just flipping through the yellow pages and finding a rental agent in your area. If you want to do it on your own, many people do it as well, I would say the first thing is to really consider whether or not you want to be a landlord. This is something that a lot of people get into and very quickly realize that it's a lot tougher than you might expect. Most of the time, most clients of mine end up paying us a service fee to a property company in order to have their rental taken care of for them. If you do decide to do it on your own, there are some places you can go, putting your ad in the newspaper is probably the best thing to do, websites like craigslist are becoming more and more and more popular and that's probably at this point one of the best spots to rent your place out. Think about how much you want to rent your place for. Make sure that the cash flows in a positive way because if it doesn't, you'll end up losing money pretty quickly on your rental. Also consider other things that are going to take into account, utilities. Are you going to include them? Are you going to allow pets into your rental unit? These things are very important because these are the questions that people are going to ask you if you're doing this on your own and I would say probably the last thing that's very important to really think about is who is going to actually live in your rental unit? Be very careful with the screening process. A lot of times a face to face meeting or putting your trust in a rental property company is the best way to do it, but if you would like to go above and beyond, you can talk with companies that involve credit checks, that involve background checks on your tenets. So these are a couple things to really think about when you are renting your home."