Happy Cheques come from Happy Tenants / Renters.

If you plan on building a rental portfolio for the long term, you want to try and encourage your existing tenants as well as your new tenants to stay as long as possible.

What are the Benefits of a long term Tenant / Renter?

The question is a very easy one to answer! .. the longer your tenants  / renters stay in your rental properties,  the more consistent your monthly rental income will be.

This then lets you plan into the future with more confidence.

How to nurture happy tenants / renters

One of the best ways to keep your tenants / renters happy is to have in place a maintenance program which they are made aware of.

They can live in your rental property and know to expect maintenance tasks to be carried out at certain times in the year.

The effect of this is twofold

(1)  Your tenant/ renter feels cared for and comfortable with your style of management,

(2)  They are going to be less inclined to look “over the bridge” and want to move.

The longer your property is filled by a tenant / renter you will find a number of additional psychological factors start to have an effect.

• They become familiar with the neighbourhood
• Friends and family become familiar with the place they are staying
• They become more involved with the community
• They get a feeling of  belonging.

These factors are all latent, hidden factors which, when combined, help to make your tenant / renter comfortable and happy.

Give more reasons to be cheerful

It is part of your job to make sure that you add to their feeling of comfort by ensuring that your maintenance tasks,  which you have listed and shown to your tenant / renter,  are carried out by the dates you said they would be completed.

You have started to establish an important bond of trust which can grow the longer they stay, as long as you do what you say you are going to do.

Tenants / Renters problems become your stepping stones

You also have to ensure that whenever a problem occurs with the property (at 22.00 on a Friday night a phone call comes in about a leaking pipe, or a blocked toilet or a problem with the gas  … in fact a problem about anything!) you have to attend to it straight away!

The hassle and inconvenience of late night call outs can be mitigated considerably by having in place a list of Trades people ( see the article “Prolong the Life of your Rental Property Tenant” ) who can carry out the work timeously and to an acceptable standard.

Knowing me .. knowing you

Always make sure that your tenant/ renter can contact you either on your office number,  your mobile or by email.

Often,  if a problem is reported late in the day or late on a Friday, or over the week-end, the tenant/ renter does not expect it to be attended to until the following Monday (unless it is really major).

If you have your Trades people in place, more often than not,  they will attend to the problem before the Monday,  and you will be in the good books even more!

A problem quickly solved

Again, the very fact that a problem at your rental property is quickly solved,  means you have turned a problem into your own stepping stone of progress to acceptability. Now your tenant / renter feels even more cared for, and increasingly less inclined to move away.

What I have noted above is all common sense and not difficult to do.

Don’t slip up!

If, however, you breach the trust that you have built up, it can take an inordinate amount of extra time to repair the damage and get back to where you were before.

During a spell like this, you have more chance of losing your tenant and losing your regular monthly happy rental cheque.

So,  the moral of the story is “don’t let a slip become a landslide!”