Beating the Rental Property Shortage
In many parts of the nation, there is a shortage of available and affordable rental properties for people who are looking for a home. If this sounds familiar, we have found that by making your rentals pet-friendly, you’ll suddenly become the go-to property for many people who have been searching in vain for a place where they and their four-legged family member can call home. Once this occurs, your new tenants will start telling others about their great new home, likely resulting in you obtaining even more new tenants.
Pet Owners are Long-Term Tenants
If there is one thing we do not like to see at our properties, it is the proverbial revolving door of tenants coming and going year after year. Not only does this make it difficult to keep vacancy rates to a minimum, but it also starts to put the property in a bad light as a place in which nobody wants to live. If you have been experiencing this problem and want to make a change for the better, allow your tenants to own a pet. In numerous studies, it has been found that pet owners tend to be long-term tenants at rentals, which makes your job as a landlord much easier. By having lower vacancy rates, you’ll ultimately have fewer expenses such as carpet cleaning and other tasks associated with a new tenant moving in.
Pet Owners are Happy People
If you are like us, we want our jobs to be as easy as possible each day when it comes to our rental properties. One of the best ways we have been able to do this is by having pet-friendly properties since in most cases people who own a pet are pretty happy and easy to get along with on a daily basis. As we all know, a happy tenant makes for a happy landlord, and a happy landlord is able to sleep well at night while increasing their bank account.
Pet Owners are More Responsible
In many cases, pet owners at rental properties turn out to be tenants who are very responsible and give their landlords few if any reasons for concern. In our experiences, we have found tenants who owned a pet were almost always on time with their rent, had few if any complaints from neighbors regarding noise or other issues, and stayed around far longer than those who did not own a pet.
Improve Your Reputation within the Community
Once you decide to become pet-friendly with your rental properties, we have found it is a great way to improve your reputation within the community, especially for multi-unit buildings. For example, by being pet-friendly, you can choose to work with local animal shelters to allow tenants to not only adopt needy animals but also offer much-needed foster homes to dogs and cats until they find a forever home. By doing so, you are not only helping the animals and the local rescue organizations but also enhancing your presence and reputation within the community. Having seen this done at numerous properties over the years, we highly recommend this strategy.
Screening Process
While some landlords complain it is too difficult to know if a person’s pet will behave itself, we have found it is very easy to have a strong screening process in place to ensure all goes well. For starters, we require pet details from each potential renter, allowing us to know how the pet is taken care of by its owner. Along with this, we also contact the person’s previous landlord to find out how they did with their pet at the previous location. By doing so, we can find out if the pet damaged the property, disturbed neighbors, or had other issues.
