4 Ideas To Fill Your Rental Vacancies During The Winter Months

It’s that time of year again and landlords are franticly trying to place tenants in their vacancies before the cold weather hits. We all know that the pool of prospects looking for rentals drastically diminishes during the cold weather months. This is the time when many landlords start making catastrophic mistakes in tenant screening.

During the spring, summer and early fall months, most good landlords are experts at tenant screening. We do credit checks, criminal background checks, eviction history checks, call former landlords, employment references and personal references. Well usually around the month of November all of that stops because landlords are so afraid of carrying a vacancy for a few months. Well let’s think about what you’re risking here. If you’re not properly screening your tenants, you may have the property rented, but you open yourself up to much more risk including nonpayment of rent, property damage and expensive legal fees trying to evict a bad tenant.

Here are 4 alternative options to conceding on tenant screening:

Reduce the rent: Many landlords don’t want to reduce their rent because of course this takes away from their bottom line. But think about it, would you rather lose $1,000 a month by having a vacancy during the entire cold weather season ($5,000 / 5 months) or discount the rental by $50 ($600 / 1 year).

Offer a Step-Up Lease: A step-up lease would have a tenant paying a certain amount for a period of time and then the rent would increase at a certain point. So you could have the tenant paying $900 a month from November until April, then in May the rent shoots up to $1,000. You could even include a provision that the tenant can opt out of the lease (and leave the unit without penalty) at the end of the April if they don’t want to pay the rent increase. If they do decide to leave in April it would actually be a benefit to you because from then on, all of your leases on that unit will end in the spring time instead of the winter.

Offer An Early Payment Discount: I actually do this all year-round.  I’ll have the tenant sign a rental agreement saying that the rent is $1,000 a month, but they will receive a $25-$50 discount if the rent is paid BEFORE the 1^st of the month. This way, I can advertise the apartment at $975-$950 as long as I disclose that this includes the discount. And yes…. If they pay between the 1^st  and the 10^th, they have to pay $1,000. Oh yeah, and if they pay after the 10^th, they’ll have to pay my $5 per day late fee until it’s paid in full.

 Be Flexible: If you’re one that doesn’t want pets or smokers in your rental. Now might be the time to be a little flexible. I would definitely suggest getting a one time or monthly pet fee or simply asking smokers to not smoke in the house. But turning these people away might just be the difference between keeping your building fully occupied and running vacancies throughout the winter.

These are just a few options that I consider when placing a tenant during these Connecticut winter months. But the one thing that you DO NOT want to do is to relax your standards in tenant screening.