Are you finding it challenging to attract reliable tenants and streamline your leasing process? In this video, I’ll walk you through every step—from listing and showing your property, to vetting applicants, signing leases, and managing tenant relationships. This guide shares my proven strategies for minimizing vacancies, avoiding evictions, and keeping your rental business stress-free and profitable. Perfect for both new and seasoned investors, these insights will help you keep your property filled with quality tenants who respect your investment.
For a complete guide on optimizing and scaling your real estate investments, download my Freedom Blueprint! This essential tool walks you through ten key steps for organizing a profitable property portfolio. Click here to get your copy today!
Video Transcript:
If you’ve ever dealt with the challenges of finding good tenants, you know how important it is to have a solid process in place that sets you up for success. Today I’m going to walk you through my best tips for finding tenants, vetting them, and making sure you’ve got the lease covered from that very first time through indie renewals and then all the way to the end of the lease without any stress along the way.
Whether you’re new to real estate investing or you’ve been doing this for years, these tips will help you save time and money while keeping your property investing running smoothly. That was awesome.
If you are a real estate investor looking to run your portfolio like a business, I put together the Freedom Blueprint 10 Essentials for Real Estate Investors. This tool walks you through the 10 essential pieces of an organized and profitable investment portfolio. You can download the blueprint and take a look to see what you have in place and what you may need to add. This is going to empower you with a plan to level up your organization of your portfolio so it takes you less time and makes you more money. Just visit my website adriangreen.com now to download it today. That’s A-D-R-I-E-N-N-E-G-R-E-E-N dot com. So now let’s dive into what it takes to get these great tenants in place and to keep them. First, let’s talk about leasing the property, best practices for finding tenants, vetting applicants, and then getting the lease done and the tenants in the property. Out of all the tenants I’ve had, I’ve only had to evict twice. One of them was completely preventable and I’ll tell you all my secrets here exactly how I changed my leasing system after this first eviction to prevent evictions as much as possible. So let’s dive into our first section of finding tenants and getting showings and getting those applications. So from placing it for rent to getting the applications. First, where do we list the place for rent? Facebook Marketplace is the most prevalent place by far. Whether you love or hate Facebook, that’s where people are. So I highly recommend doing a Facebook Marketplace listing. That is where you’re going to get in front of the most eyes and that is of course going to get you the most interest and then the most money by getting tenants in quickly. The other thing I would share is that we use Apartments.com as a tool for our long-term rentals in a lot of ways. And there’s other services like Apartments.com that are kind of like an all-in-one tool for people who are self-managing their properties. And the cool thing is that in this one place you can put something for rent and it’s going to feed to all the major rental or listing places. It’s going to feed to Zillow. It’s going to feed to Realtor. It’s going to feed to wherever people can list places for rent in those kind of syndicated locations. It does not feed to Facebook Marketplace. You would need to do that yourself. Well, that’s the good news. Pretty much we always just list on Facebook Marketplace and then we make an Apartments.com listing and those two places put it 99% of places that renters would be looking. So now you’ve got that listing up and people are going to reach out when they’re interested. How do you show the property? Whether you are local or long distance, I recommend you coordinate with a Realtor to do open house style showings for your rental. You find a Realtor first by asking your Realtor or asking Realtors you know. I can tell you the average person knows multiple Realtors even in other markets. And you ask that Realtor, hey, would they or someone they know be interested in getting paid by the hour to host these open house showings at your rental. I have found that newer agents typically jump on these opportunities because it takes a while for them to get their business spun up and going. And so the opportunity to make some money in a few hours on a weekend is generally pretty appealing. The second thing as you set up these showings is like I said, we want to do open house style showings. So I would speak to this agent and have them pick one or two time blocks each week or weekend of one to two hours each. So maybe they’re going to show the property on Wednesday evening from four to six and Saturday afternoon from three to five. Anything like that. And then when somebody reaches out on your listing and asks about the property, you can tell them to come by during those time blocks. So someone calls up or nobody calls anymore. Somebody goes on Facebook marketplace and says, hey, is this available? You can say thank you so much for your interest. Yes, it is. And we are doing showings Wednesday from three to five and Saturday from four to six. Which of those times can I expect you? We always want people to confirm if they’re going to be there. So the real estate agent knows and we can, if nobody’s confirmed, then you don’t even hold that showing, right? So I would continue to follow up if they don’t respond to that. Hey, you know, I know you reached out about this property. Are you going to come on Wednesday on Saturday? When can I expect you? Yes, it is some work. And yet sending a little message on Facebook or via email is not the end of the world. And we’ll get them in into the property that way. So that’s what I recommend doing these open house showings with a real estate agent, not you get a professional in there. And that’s how you ask people to show up. And there are several reasons why let’s walk through those. And I’m assuming I need it right away. So the first reason we do this is to save you money, right? This way, you’re not paying the agents for a bunch of showings, and especially for no shows, right? To deceive the agent time and frustration. Renters are notorious for being no shows to showings. So here we’re going to group everyone together so that odds are someone’s going to show up during that time period, and the agent isn’t wasting their time. Three, doing this really creates demand. Multiple people showing up at the same time shows of some competition, right? That they got to actually do the application. They got to get it in and they got to look good, because they aren’t the only one interested in this property. So I have found that it really gets a lot of speed and quality on the part of the tenants when they do showings this way. All right, so now you’ve listed the property you’ve had showings and ideally people are wanting to apply. So let’s talk about that application process and vetting applicants. And this is where I updated my systems notably after our first eviction. So there are reasons why I say do it this way. First, like I said before, we use Apartments.com and they have a built-in application. That is the application that we use. People can do the background check in there, everything is in there. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There are multiple resources like this that you can use for the application and for the background check. Now, most real estate investors get this application with all this information, who your last landlord was, who the one was before that, who your boss is, and then they do nothing with it. 9 out of 10 aren’t calling any of those references. And so that is the one thing that I’ve really improved on since we had to do this first eviction, is I call every phone number and I really ask them some questions, right? I really want to dig deep. And that’s because people might fudge the truth or you just want to kind of get beneath that first layer when you’re talking to these people. And here are some specific things to look out for. So first, let’s talk about calling those past landlords. What happened in our eviction is the tenant had said that she was living with family. So I don’t know if we even, I think we called that number and they didn’t answer and that was that, right? I would call the number for the past landlord or the family and I wouldn’t stop until we got ahold of them. I’d call, I’d text, and if we couldn’t reach them in a day, I’d let the prospective tenant know, hey, we are not able to move forward with your application because we have not been able to get ahold of your last landlord. Can you please reach out to them and have them call me back at this number? So that we can move forward with processing your application. That is what I would say. And so then when you do get them on the phone, ask some questions. Hey, you know, Jane Doe told me that she was living with you for a while because she’s family. How long was she with you? How’d that go? Did you charge any rent? Do you know about who her landlord was before that? What happened there? Why did she move? They may or may not tell you and yet usually if you ask enough questions, they’re going to tell you something, right? And so people will do a couple things and people will say that they’ve been living with family to hide past evictions. So that’s a heads up because most people’s mamas are going to say anything to help their kids, right? So that’s one thing if they say that they’re living with family to really kind of dig in because that’s a little bit of like a caution sign. It could be an issue. It could be fine. Could be an issue. So just ask some questions and to kind of vet that out. The other thing that could happen is people could be staying with family or friends and pretending that that person’s a landlord. I’ve seen that happen as well. So when you call somebody who is a, you know, a prospective landlord, how long have you known this person? Did you know them prior to being their landlord or how did they find out about your rental? You know, something like that. And those kind of questions help because you really want to know if you’re getting an unbiased third party or if you’re getting somebody who has a relationship with that tenant. Write that down. Then of course, you’re going to ask all the standard questions as well. Have they always paid their rent on time? If you had any issues, have there been complaints from neighbors? Things like that. All right. So that is calling the landlord. Then you’re also going to call the employer. You’re going to ask a few questions. How long have they worked for you? Do you expect them to continue to work for you? Are they on a project basis or, you know, are they going to continue long term in the future? Any reason to believe that they would not be working with you within the time of this year lease, something like that. And again, you’re just kind of being conversational and asking to learn some of this stuff. And you’re going to see if red flags pop up as you do that, if there are red flags to pop up. All right. So you’ve gone through their application. You’ve called their references. You’ve looked at the background check that came with that application. Now you’re going to go one more step. Okay. Because the background checks and it doesn’t matter what service you use. Sometimes they catch things. Sometimes they don’t. I had a applicant once who had a felony on their record and shared that so that it didn’t come up in the background check. He wanted to know before he spent the money on the application of the background check, would I even consider him with this felony? And so he put it all in his application and that did not pull up on his background check. The felony did not pull up. We’ve had other things not pull up. That was probably the one that was the most extreme. So we always say run your own checks in the local police databases. So I would look up if there’s city, county, state, police databases, sheriff databases, where I can see if this person has had a history of a crime. If I know they’re from another region, another city, I’m going to go see if I can find those databases for that area and run it. And again, this is a situation where a little bit of work up front is going to save you a whole lot of work by preventing a potential eviction. Okay. Here’s a word from our sponsor. Are you an active real estate investor feeling overwhelmed by endless tasks? 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You’re going to have issues. And so you’ve done the best you can there. So now you’ve accepted this tenant and you’re going to sign a lease. You’re going to have them check out the property like for a final, oh, an initial walkthrough. You’re going to have them move in. Let’s talk through what that looks like for the lease. You want to research if there’s any state specific laws for what your lease should or should not contain. First, we can’t have a blanket lease for everywhere because every state is different. Another thing I’d point out is that realtor associations either city, you know, regional county or statewide realtor associations typically have a standard lease. So if you’re working with a real estate agent, they may be able to help you and provide that lease. So you’re going to have the lease completed. What I recommend for completing the lease is that you upload it to an e-signature platform and you and the tenant sign via e-signature. As far as I am aware, now I am not attorney in all 50 states. As far as I’m aware, e-signatures for leases are valid in all the states that I know of. So you’re going to have that done. You’re going to set up an initial date and then they’re going to pay. They’re going to pay their first month’s rent and their security deposit. And they’re not going to get the keys until both of those clear. So they can choose to do something like cash or cashier’s check. That’s instant. And then they’ll get the keys right away. Or if they instead choose to do something like personal check, which takes a while to clear, that is going to prolong the period until they can get the keys. This is another thing we learned from our eviction. She paid some cash and then she paid some with check and the check bounced. So we did not get all the money. Oh my god. So that is something else. Now we do not give keys until both that first month’s rent and that security deposit have cleared. Once that happens, I would recommend using that same agent who did the showings to do an initial walkthrough. They will meet the new tenants at the house. They will get the keys out of the lockbox. It would give a copy of the keys to the tenant and they will walk through the house to do the initial walkthrough with the tenant. There is typically a form you’re going to want to complete with this. And you also want to check if there’s any disclosures or any forms that your tenants need to sign. Some states have specific disclosures or forms or things that the tenants need to sign. So that could be done at the walkthrough if you didn’t do it with the lease. Otherwise in the walkthrough, the agent and the tenants are going to walk through room by room and agree on the condition of the house. If anything is wrong, there are marks on the walls, a light switch is broken. They’re going to document that in the walkthrough form and with a photo and you put these things onto your computer, onto your drive that’s in the cloud and you keep them so that you remember what the condition was when the tenant leaves at the end of their lease. So now they’re in the property, they’ve done the lease, they’ve paid and they are happy. The only thing that you should be doing for that next year or so that the lease is in place is handling any maintenance issues that come up. Make sure you subscribe to the channel because we’ll have more videos on maintenance and how to handle that. And so it really should be mailbox money for the most part until the lease comes up for renewal at the end of what’s most likely a year period. So now let’s move on and talk about renewing the lease and how doing it well can increase your profitability. So ideally your tenants renew. Lower turnover means so much more profitability. It keeps you from having vacancy periods because people are in there and it keeps you from the cost of having to prep the property for a new tenant. So I love renewals, okay? Makes a huge, huge difference. Now the other way that you’re going to do a renewal well so that you’re going to increase your profitability and make money is I always do an annual price increase with my renewal because here’s the alternative. If you keep tenants for years and you never do an annual price increase down the road, you’re going to be charging well below market rent and the tenant can’t budget for a large increase in rent. You can’t take someone’s rent from $1,200 to $1,500 a month in one month and expect that they can pay it. Well you may say, oh I can swing another $300 a month, no problem. You’re not someone renting a $1,200 a month apartment then, okay? So what I like to do instead is do smaller increases every year when we renew where it doesn’t affect their budget notably and yet it keeps us pretty competitive with market rent so we’re not going to have a huge multiple hundred dollar gap a few years down the road. Depending on the monthly rent, I most often do an increase of $50 to $100 a month. A larger increase could be warranted depending on what rate you’re charging. So if you’re charging $3,000 a month, it might make sense to go up to $3,150 or something like that. The other note I would say about rent increases is they differ based on how long of a renewal the person wants. So our typical lease renewal is going to be a year. Let’s say somebody’s like, hey I’m not going to be here a year when I’d love another three to six months. Well if I was at $2,000 and I was going to go up to $2,100 let’s say, I might say, okay sure I can do a three or six month lease renewal but it’s going to be $2,200 instead. Or if they don’t want to renew the lease and they just want to go month to month, same thing. I’m going to charge a premium for that because that’s something that’s going to be very difficult for them to find. There’s a new lease extension so in that case I’d be like sure I can do that. It’s going to be $2,200 a month but if you wanted to do another year lease it would be $2,100 a month. That’s why I would say it. Okay so that’s everything with the lease extension and now how do we do the paperwork? You want to either complete a lease extension document or a new lease. Again I am not an attorney. I will tell you in my personal experience we most often do a lease extension that simply notes the new dates and price because that’s often what’s all that’s changing. If we were changing more extensive aspects of the lease, which I have done on a few occasions, then we’ll do a new lease. Another example is we had a property that was renting to college students you know or like one had each room and every year like one of the guys would leave and another one would come. We would do a new lease every time there because someone was actually changing and we wanted that original or that new person on the entire lease document. All right so you’ve extended the lease and yet eventually nearly every tenant leaves. So let’s talk about what it looks like to end the lease and to do that tenant turnover. We’re going to talk about the two situations. One is the standard end of the lease and the second is the not so pleasant eviction. So the standard end of the lease. What that’s going to look like is typically four to six weeks prior to the end of the lease. We send up an email say hey your lease is ending here. Are you wanting to renew or are you wanting to move out? Most people know if they’re going to be moving out or saying six weeks out. If they decide that they’re going to move out, I would ideally get your handyman or contractor in there about a month prior to the end of the lease. Coordinate hey we just want the handyman to come through, see what the situation is so we can plan on doing the repairs as soon as the lease ends. I’ve never had an issue with tenants doing that and that’s really fabulous because handymen and contractors are busy and they’re usually booked out especially if they’re good and so by them getting in about a month prior, they can get you ready to go as soon as those tenants move out. They can put the put it on the calendar, they know the scope of the work and they can be ready to hit the ground running and you have less vacancy time which means more money in your pocket. Then what I typically do is you know how at the beginning of the lease that real estate agent took the keys out of the lockbox? I leave the lockbox at the house, I give the tenants the code. So if we ever need contractors to get in there and the tenants aren’t there, contractor can still get in especially if an urgent thing comes up. So they have a lockbox and so they can move out, they can put the keys in the lockbox and leave it on the house and then I again often rely on real estate agents because I love doing long distance real estate investing and not trading my time for money. So I would then have that real estate agent go through, I’d give them that initial condition sheet and I would say hey what’s the condition now and ask them to take photos. Between the handyman going in and checking things and doing photos and then the agent doing this, you’ll have a good idea of the house’s condition if there was any excessive damage that you need to charge the tenants for and so that usually covers everything on that base and then you’re having the contractor go in do whatever repairs it needs to be ready and you are re-listing the property for rent. Again now here’s another little note, somebody moves out, it’s also a great time to re-evaluate is this the right property for me to own right now, right? I love to take that time and look at my spreadsheet and say what returns am I getting? What’s the new market rent going to be? What’s my return going to look like with that? And the other thing I look at is how much equity do I have in this property, right? What’s my cash on cash here, right? Would I be better served to sell this house in 1031 into something else? Once I get this new tenant in place, do I want to do a cash out refi instead? So these turnover times are great places to determine if you should make a financial change because selling a house that is vacant is a whole lot easier than selling a house with a tenant in place. So keep that in mind and use this time to make sure you want to keep the house. Now let’s talk about evictions instead. So if you have to evict and that’s how you’re ending a lease, expect there’s going to be more of a headache. We’re not going to talk about everything with evictions. That is a whole video in and of itself. But I would just say this, when you are evicting, expect more damage to be done. Expect that there could be some trash and junk left in the house and you may have to pay somebody to come in and clean it out or you have to pay for a dumpster. Other than that, a lot of the pieces are the same as the standard end of the lease. You’re going to want to go get a handyman or a contractor to go through and see what repairs need to be done and get them done as soon as possible. But you’re probably not going to get that person in prior to the eviction because tenants who are being evicted are not going to let people in the house. Well, guys, that’s it. By putting these strategies into action, you’re not just finding tenants, you’re finding good tenants who are going to treat your property well and pay on time. Now, trust me, a little extra work up front to do all this property saves you a ton of headaches later. And if you really want to take your real estate game to the next level, don’t forget to grab the Freedom Blueprint from my website. It’s packed with more tools to help you stay organized and profitable so you can focus on growing your portfolio with less stress and more success. Just visit my website, adriennegreen.com to download it today and I can’t wait to catch you again next week.