How Building Good Relationships with Tenants Can Improve Your Real Estate Business
Going into real estate investing, you will have to learn a lot about professional relationships and personality types. As a landlord, your job will be not only to rent properties to tenants but also to be able to recognize if a potential tenant is going to help you grow your business or hold you back. After all, bad tenants can cause a lot of damage and frustration, which can lead to you starting to dread your position as a landlord. To make sure that doesn’t happen, you have to do some work upfront and put effort into a detailed screening process when selecting applicants. Here’s why!
Why it Pays Off to Do the Work
It’s safe to say that I’ve gone through my fair share of good and bad tenant experiences. This time, I want to share a good one to show you why it is important to do tenant screening properly. Long story short, there was a tenant that had applied for a single family home that I was renting and we went through the entire screening process. She had a good income and hit the rent to income ratio without problems thanks to a stable job she had. Both her work references and friend references checked out so we got the green light to proceed.
To make things even better, she decided to pay some rent upfront, which was phenomenal. Mind you, this was not at all something we had suggested but something that she offered to do. It helped out the cash load of the business a bit more and everyone was happy with how things were playing out. Ultimately, she moved in and she even started planting flowers around the property, treating the property as if it were her own. That didn’t go unnoticed because, as soon as she moved in, we drove by and noticed flower pots on the doorstep.
We were pleasantly surprised because it’s nice to see people treating your property with respect. The people that this actually matters to, like myself, are gonna reward you a bit more for the respectful behavior. So, when she had a hard time when covid hit, she couldn't pay rent. Since we had a great relationship and I was treating my tenant as a client, I was able to help her out. We gave her a month's delay on rent and she paid back later when she was able to do so. Even during her move out there were no damages and she treated the place with a ton of respect. She even cleaned up before moving.
I was upset to lose her as a tenant but she was moving in with a friend in a different city so I had to let her go. A month later, she texted and asked if she could move back in because it hasn’t gone so well with that roommate. We had such a great relationship that I was the first person she called when she started looking for a new place. Once you start building positive relationships like that, people will keep coming back to your business. Unfortunately, we had already rented her unit out but we had a property available in the city she was in since we were just finishing renovations. This worked out perfectly and I fast tracked the renovations to help her move in as quickly as possible.
Overall, we have a great back and forth relationship where we’re able to help each other when necessary. All of this was a great experience and I still have her as a tenant today. It’s one of those tenant relationships where you want to get them a gift basket at Christmas because it’s worth it. Moral of the story - if I hadn’t gone through the detailed screening process to ensure her background and income checks out, I could’ve ended up in a bad situation with a tenant who’s causing nothing but trouble.