Selecting the best possible tenant for your investment property is the absolute number one key to ensuring a successful tenancy. Basically, if you spend a little bit of extra time and get it right, it will likely save you a lot more time and money during the tenancy!
Before starting in Property Management, I came from a HR/Recruitment background and I have seen first-hand on so many occasions how important it is to get the right person - This also applies to tenant selection.
Unfortunately, in Property Management, the threshold for tenant selection is quite low at most agencies. If you aren’t already aware, a standard process is to check that the weekly rent is less than 30% of the total income listed on the application. Then, a generic form is emailed to the previous property manager which asks a few basic questions about how they look after the property and pay their rent on time.
Most tenants aren’t even spoken with prior to their application being sent to owner for consideration!
At QPC, we engage with our potential tenants early on and ask them a number of scenario-based questions around common situations that occur throughout a tenancy to see how they would deal them. It’s almost like a job interview and the advantage of this style is that you are able to uncover things like a tenant being willing to fix minor maintenance issues themselves rather than call for a tradesman to come in and replace something like a door stop.
We also not only call the current employer of our potential tenants, but we also check to see whether there may be any potential issues with their employment such as the applicant being under performance management or facing potential redundancy which would have an impact on their ability to pay rent.
Getting tenant selection right is one of the fundamental strategies that QPC Property Rentals specialises in to ensure your investment is well managed.
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