How To: Self-Manage Your Rental Properties
Are you a new Landlord? Is managing your rental properties harder than you thought?
Over the past few years, there has been a boom in new real estate investors, particularly in the area of residential rentals. This has been driven by many factors, including the erratic behavior of the stock market and low interest rates. In recent years, the real estate market has had much fewer fluctuations than the stock market. With well-screened tenants and good occupancy rates, real estate can provide steady income for many years.
Now, there are a few pitfalls to becoming a landlord… Namely, you have tenants to take care of! Unlike a company you buy stock in, where all the decisions are made by people you’ll never meet, in board rooms you’ll never see, you run the ship when investing in rental property.
Where do you begin to find and screen new tenants, track down the rent check every month, and find someone to fix that pesky refrigerator on a Saturday evening? Many people hire residential property managers to do this work for them. This can be a great, hands-off approach; however, it may cost as much as 10% of the monthly rent.
Others are taking a DIY (Do It Yourself) approach and relying on a combination of email, spreadsheets, notepads, calendars and a rolodex to keep their investments operating effectively. Institutional real estate investors have the scale and funds to justify implementing sophisticated, high-end software systems to manage their hundreds or thousands of homes. Unfortunately, there have not been any affordable, easy to use solutions for the small real estate investor that may only own a few rental units. We built Rentlit to fill this hole and make it easy for small scale, “do it yourself” landlords to self-manage their rental properties.
Rentlit takes the hassle out of managing your rental properties. We help landlords:
- Find New Tenants: We list your property on all the major rental sites for free.
- Collect Tenant Applications: Renters interested in your place fill out a short application so your inbox is filled with serious renters rather than tire kickers.
- Comprehensive Background Checks: We check credit score, criminal and eviction history so you can have piece of mind of who’s living in your place.
- Create a Lease: We automate the lease writing process.
- Collect Rent: Your tenants can link their bank account in minutes so they can pay rent via direct bank transfer (ACH) or use credit or debit cards.
- Cover Maintenance: We offer a maintenance warranty that covers any appliance or system in your rentals removing the uncertainty and hassles of maintenance.
If you own residential rental units and want to simplify the management process, check out www.rentlit.com.
