Show a rental before it's ready?
August 25, 2015 9:00 AM Subscribe
Should I start showing my rental property before new carpet is installed? It looks terrible right now.
If I show it will the state of the carpet turn people off? Will people want to pay a lower rental price?
The carpet has numerous stains and a few tears from the previous renter.
I'm in Denver where the occupancy rate is extremely high. It's something like 96%. In fact, I asked a question some time ago about it and got two people asking about it on Askmefi. People are having a lot of trouble finding somewhere to live.
Any thoughts?
If I show it will the state of the carpet turn people off? Will people want to pay a lower rental price?
The carpet has numerous stains and a few tears from the previous renter.
I'm in Denver where the occupancy rate is extremely high. It's something like 96%. In fact, I asked a question some time ago about it and got two people asking about it on Askmefi. People are having a lot of trouble finding somewhere to live.
Any thoughts?
You're in a tight rental market, its pretty common to view and apply for an apartment in a tight market, knowing that some stuff will get fixed, and to sort of be able to visualize that stuff. Show it regardless, but don't bag out on actually doing the work. If someone takes the rental and signs papers and all that, just be kind and give them a written addition, signed and dated with the completion date of whatever's going to get completed…even if its before their actual move in date.
We had a landlord a couple years ago who was planning on putting in a fence around the house. It was one of the reasons we actually rented it. They didn't even start for 6 months after we started renting and it took them 3 months to actually finish building it (and then a car crashed into it a month or so after they finished it…oh man…). It would have been way better to even just know that he wasn't even going to start the fence for another 6 months.
Just communicate with the renter, and don't BS them and you should be totally fine getting market rate. Renters understand this kind of stuff.
posted by furnace.heart at 9:42 AM on August 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
We had a landlord a couple years ago who was planning on putting in a fence around the house. It was one of the reasons we actually rented it. They didn't even start for 6 months after we started renting and it took them 3 months to actually finish building it (and then a car crashed into it a month or so after they finished it…oh man…). It would have been way better to even just know that he wasn't even going to start the fence for another 6 months.
Just communicate with the renter, and don't BS them and you should be totally fine getting market rate. Renters understand this kind of stuff.
posted by furnace.heart at 9:42 AM on August 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
If you can get the carpet done quick, do it before you accept a tenant. There are people who won't be able to visualize the new carpet. There are people who don't trust landlords 100% to do work. There are people who may wonder about the grade of tenants (size of pets?) who will be their neighbors. Remember: it may feel like tenants are competing with each other, but you are also competing with other landlords for the highest-FICO, lowest-impact, top-dollar-gladly-paid tenant, too.
posted by MattD at 9:55 AM on August 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by MattD at 9:55 AM on August 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
Renter in a tight rental market here. I would apply to rent your place if you had carpet installation scheduled but not completed yet. However, I wouldn't sign a lease until it was completed. You can use the few days' leeway between application and lease signing to make sure it's done and maybe reshow it to the applicants. It would help if you had a little carpet scrap to show me.
posted by cabingirl at 10:23 AM on August 25, 2015
posted by cabingirl at 10:23 AM on August 25, 2015
Landlord in a tight market here. To me it depends on two things: how you're pricing it, and how much you value hassle vs. certainty.
If you want to price at the higher end of the range of rents you might get, you probably want to show it refinished.
If you want to minimize hassle, you probably want to wait until it's done, show it in a "what you see is what you get" fashion, and then choose a tenant who is ready to move in right away.
If you are willing to price it more modestly, I'd go ahead and show it now. You might even hear someone say they'll take it as is.
But you might run into some hassle, especially if you're asking people to envision better future conditions and pay rent based on those conditions. They might hem and haw and say that they're looking at a variety of places and that they'll come back to see and decide then. On the other hand, you might luck into someone who really wants to lock the place in early and that will give you more piece of mind.
posted by slidell at 1:34 PM on August 25, 2015
If you want to price at the higher end of the range of rents you might get, you probably want to show it refinished.
If you want to minimize hassle, you probably want to wait until it's done, show it in a "what you see is what you get" fashion, and then choose a tenant who is ready to move in right away.
If you are willing to price it more modestly, I'd go ahead and show it now. You might even hear someone say they'll take it as is.
But you might run into some hassle, especially if you're asking people to envision better future conditions and pay rent based on those conditions. They might hem and haw and say that they're looking at a variety of places and that they'll come back to see and decide then. On the other hand, you might luck into someone who really wants to lock the place in early and that will give you more piece of mind.
posted by slidell at 1:34 PM on August 25, 2015
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I put up an ad for my rental on Craigslist before it was ready, because some people start looking over a month before they need to move... and got 12 responses in the first 10 minutes. I had to take the ad down after 10 minutes because it was just so overwhelming. It worked out fine, people came to look at my rental when it still needed a lot of work and we ended up finding tenants with plenty of time to spare, but my point is that if you're in a tight rental market like that, you'll have no trouble finding a tenant in like 5 minutes flat, so you can wait if you want to. But if you don't want to you can probably find tenants just fine as-is too. Ask for the rent you want. If it's reasonable, you'll find people willing to pay no matter what it looks like right now. But it might be less of a PITA to just wait until it's ready.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 9:10 AM on August 25, 2015