Tenant Retention: Putting Together A Great Welcome Packet
Finding quality tenants to occupy your rental properties for the long term is one of the most effective ways to improve your cash flow and keep your out of pocket expenses to a minimum for your investment. Once you find a great tenant, the key is to help make it easy for them to want to stay in your house for a long period of time. This starts from the first day that they move in.
If you aren’t in the habit of putting together welcome packets for your tenants, then you might want to start. The move in should involve more than them just going through and marking off items on a Move In Inspection Report (link leads to exclusive resources for our Real Estate Investor Bronze Members). Your tenants should also feel warmly welcomed into their new home. That’s right – you want it to feel like home, both so that they will stay for the long term, and so that they will take good care of the property.
A Welcome Packet can consist of many things, but at the very least, it should include basic contact info for their convenience, including how to contact you (or your Property Manager), how to contact the utility companies that they will need to set up services with, basic emergency numbers, and useful community numbers and info as well. This last category could include the public library, public transportation, the post office, city parks and recreation and so on.
It should also include important information about the property, like where the water shut-off is, etc. Furthermore, it would be helpful to you as the property owner to supply the tenant with some air filters along with instructions to replace them on a monthly basis. Our experience has been that even though our leases include this as a tenant responsibility, few tenants keep up with this maintenance and it ends up costing more in the long run. So, if they have the filters and information on how and when to change them…it’s much more likely that it will get done! You should also remind them in your instructions that having a clean air filter will improve the performance of the heat/air unit and will also keep the cost of their utility bills down as well.
You should definitely include some dining and entertainment information as well. If you can muster up some coupons, that’s a really nice touch too. When tenants first move-in to a new area, it’s great to have some easy choices for where to eat at, etc. What’s better than having a coupon for some Chinese delivery after a full day of unpacking boxes?
The point is that you want your tenants to feel welcome and informed as they move in to your property. It shouldn’t just be an exchange where you’ve already collected money and a deposit from them and now you’re just giving them the keys and a Move In Inspection Report. They should feel welcomed into their new home, and you should rest easy knowing that they’ve also been given important information about taking care of the property as well.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Download Secret Property Management Tips and Tricks a real estate course that we are offer free for a very limited time.
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