Buying an historic apartment building is a great way to preserve some of the history in your area and to provide quality housing to local residents. But when you are the owner of an apartment building, it is essential you follow some guidelines when renting out units to tenants in your area to prevent a loss of rental income and damages to your apartment. Here are some tips to help you find good tenants to live in and take care of your historic apartments.
Prepare Each Unit Before Showing It
When a tenant moves out of one of your apartments, there is likely going to be cleaning and work to prepare the unit for a new tenant. When you are advertising the unit's availability, you will have potential renters want to look at the interior of the unit before they choose to rent the space. An apartment that is not cleaned and ready for a move-in should not be shown to a potential tenant. Showing a unit before it has been cleaned, painted, and any repairs made can leave a bad impression on any potential tenant.
For this reason, be sure to schedule your preparations to the unit to ready it for a move-in as quickly as possible. This includes cleaning carpets, refinishing hardwood floors, painting over any scratches on the walls, repairing wall nail holes, and cleaning appliances. Make sure all burnt-out light bulbs are replace with new, window sills are cleaned out, and dirty hand prints are cleaned from the walls to give a good impression to potential renters and to attract quality tenants.
Qualify Every Applicant
When you have a person who is interested in renting one of your apartments, you want to make sure they will be a good, responsible tenant. You want to find someone who will take care of the property and be responsible to their financial obligation.
To help you do this, be sure to have each applicant over the age of 18 fill out and sign an application to provide you with their information and pay an application fee. The application fee will go toward the payment for you to do a credit and background check on each applicant.
Make sure your application includes a disclosure to provide you permission to run a background and credit check for each applicant to protect yourself legally. Then, you can request these checks through one of several online services, including credit bureau agencies. Also verity your applicant's job and income by inspecting their latest paycheck stubs. Then, call their past landlords to make sure they have good rent payment history, verifying the last couple years. Their past rental history can be a good indicator of how timely they will pay their rent to you.