Landlord Solutions For End To End Property Management

Running a rental property, being a landlord, comes with a variety of responsibilities. From securing deals to managing maintenance requests from tenants and a dozen tasks in between. Thankfully, there are several outstanding tools and information sources designed to make a landlord’s life easier, and perhaps more importantly to ensure the success of their business venture.

In this article, we take a look at each of the key steps, from becoming a property owner to a successful property manager and outline some of the essential landlord solutions and tools needed for a complete end to end property management system.

1. Get Good Financing Options For Your Investments

Your journey as a landlord begins with finding and financing your perfect property. In this article, we are only addressing long term investment properties as supposed to those looking for loans for the brrrr method.

If you acquire the right property for the right price with the right financing it could become cashflow positive relatively quickly. However, getting a cheap mortgage for an investment property is harder than getting one for your owner-occupied home. This is because lenders charge more for investment properties – working on the assumption that they are assuming more risk.

Despite this, traditional banks and mortgage lenders do typically offer pretty reasonable interest rates.

There are several ways you might go about getting financing for your investment properties. But in general, you will want to ensure that whichever lender you go to will offer you the best possible rates.

Below, we’ve collected a few of the top comparison sites that you might want to visit to check if your mortgage rates are the best they could be.

• For mortgage comparisons, you can visit Nerd Wallet.
• For more information on Investment property mortgages: The Complete Mortgage Guide

A few final things to consider when thinking about your rental property mortgage:

1. They often won’t lend to LLCs or other legal entities,
2. They report the loan to the credit bureaus, and
3. They don’t allow more than a few (usually four) mortgages reporting on your credit report.

2. Run the Numbers: Is it a Good Deal?

We mentioned above the importance of finding the right property or the right price. But what does that actually mean and how will you know?

We explore the investor’s formula identifying the good opportunities from the bad in our blog, Key Figures for Evaluating an Investment Property.

Essentially you want to consider the following 4 things:

1. Average House prices
2. Expected Expenses
3. Down payment
4. Rental Income

You can also use software from the likes of DealCheck, which is a software that allows you to quickly and efficiently run the numbers on potential deals.

Other websites to gain key information are places like Zillow where you can compare house prices as well as average rental amounts in particular areas.

USE RENTAL YIELD CALCULATOR

3. Set the Right Rent Amount

You need to set a fair rental price if you want to attract great tenants. However, there is a fine line to tread. Charge too little though and you may struggle to make your property cash flow positive. Thankfully there are solutions for landlords such as software like Rentometer or Rent Zestimates by Zillow.

Read our article on How to Set The Right Rent Amount

4. Find And Select The Best Tenant

Once you’ve secured an awesome deal the next thing is to find that perfect tenant to occupy the property so you can start generating some cash flow. When you are looking for great tenants it’s important to understand what makes a good tenant.

We’ve written up an extensive tenant screening guide which you can download for free here.

Essentially, you want tenants that can and will pay rent on time, in full, and importantly, respect your property as if it were their own. To determine this, as part of your tenant screening process we always advise landlords to run a comprehensive tenant screening report. This can be done through our app at no cost to the landlord.

Learn more about tenant screening with the Landlord Studio app →

6. Get Your Legal Documents In Order

Once, you’ve bought the property you need to make sure you have all the relevant legal documentation that landlords need.

A few key landlord documents include but aren’t limited to:

1. Your Lease Agreement
2. Landlord Non-renewal Notice
3. Notice to Enter
4. Eviction Notice
5. LLC Documentation

Read our full article on the essential legal documents for landlords.