Boosting Occupancy Rate: Property Managers Guide

Published in

Mashvisor

5 min readSep 17, 2019

Good property management requires following up on leads, meeting client needs, and maximizing occupancy. It’ll be rather difficult to succeed in this profession if all focus is centered on one function and not divided among the others. As a residential property manager, it’s your job to keep vacancy low and the occupancy rate of your rental properties high. This is sometimes easier said than done. But we’ve got some basic steps you could apply to get a good occupancy rate.

How to Achieve a High Occupancy Rate

This is crucial to the success of any property management company. Sometimes rental demand is high so filling up your rental units isn’t difficult. But in most cases, you’re competing with other rental properties over a limited tenant pool. To come out on top and draw in more renters, you need to have an edge over the competition. Here is a couple of ways on how you can do that:

Start off By Studying the Real Estate Market

Increasing occupancy rate won’t happen if you don’t even know what kind of real estate market you’re in and what the other factors at play are. Learn about the other rental properties in close proximity to yours. Find out how they’re performing and if there’s any reason they might have a higher occupancy rate. Compare rent prices and amenities.

The best way to get the closest estimation is to do this with properties most similar to the ones you’re managing. What you want to find are rental comps. Make sure to choose these based on similarity in location, property type, property size, features, and rental strategy. That’s right, the occupancy rate for the same property rented out traditionally ( long-term rentals) will differ than if it was rented out short-term on sites like Airbnb.

What’s the fastest way to find these rental comps? By using Mashvisor’s tools. Our search tools allow you to find investment properties with comps, in addition to existing traditional and Airbnb rentals. Learn more about our product.

Focus on Tenant Retention

Don’t just direct all of your efforts toward finding new tenants, disregarding the ones you currently have. What’s the point of doing all the work to increase occupancy if you can’t maintain it? Keep positive relationships with your existing tenants by making sure their needs are met, their complaints are resolved, and their experiences are positive. This will motivate them to stick with you for the long run, keeping tenant turnover low. Maybe your current tenants are so happy with their stay, they’ll recommend friends or family to sign leases in your rental properties. This will also help you establish a good reputation for your residential property management company.

Work on Your Property Management Marketing Strategy

Are you doing online marketing? If not, you should start. If you are but haven’t really gained any new property management leads, you might need to change your strategy. Online marketing is a great method for boosting occupancy rate as it opens up your business to a much wider renter base. By using the internet, you’re reaching more potential tenants.

A lot of property management companies invest heavily in SEO and their websites to make sure any content they post online, or any advertisements for their rentals are recognized by the search engines. Before you buy anything these days, chances are, you’re going to do a quick online search for it. The same applies to renters looking for a new place. They are most likely to search for rental properties near them. If you’ve advertised your rental properties using the right keywords to rank you higher up in the search results, these potential renters will definitely spot your rental properties.

Improve Tenant Screening

Yes, you want to up your rental occupancy rate, but that doesn’t mean you just take in anyone. You still need to have a good tenant screening process. No tenants are better than bad tenants. Do background checks, credit score checks, and whatever you can to ensure that this tenant is a good fit for your property management clients. After all, it’s the client’s property, so the tenants you get should be in line with the property owner’s standards.

This doesn’t mean you should spend as much time possible before approving a tenant. Have an efficient screening process. Qualifying tenants from the beginning will lower the chances of any trouble in the future (missed rent payments, property damage, evictions).

Update the Rental Listing

Is the rental property listing you have reflecting the true value of the property? You don’t want to bore anyone with an essay describing the property, but it’s important that you clearly and concisely mention all the important details. The layout of the property listing is important too. Make sure it’s easy to read and provides all the necessary information.

A key part of any listing is the photos. Descriptions won’t be as good as the real thing. Catch people’s attention by providing quality pictures of the rental property. And add a lot. People love seeing all the details you have listed actually shown in the photos. The more attractive your rental listing, the more people it will draw in, and the higher your occupancy rate.

Use Property Management Software

It all comes down to the digital resources you have at your disposal. Using property management software to help you out will make things a whole lot easier. And you don’t even have to go looking for it- we’ve got your number one choice right here. Mashvisor’s analytics can prove to be very useful to property managers. Our software will provide you with not just the occupancy rate data, but other important metrics. Think rental income, rental expenses, cash flow, cap rate, and more. Having access to this readily available data will make analyzing the properties under your management a simple task. There’s no need to study the occupancy rate formula when we do the work for you. Our platform even provides data for Airbnb occupancy rate.

You can use our data to analyze your clients’ investment properties to understand how to manage them better. Or you can use our software to locate investment properties for sale with high occupancy rates for your clients to purchase. Just give the data a chance and it will prove to be invaluable for your traditional or vacation rental property management career. Start out your 14-day free trial with Mashvisor now.

Originally published at https://www.mashvisor.com on September 17, 2019.