Good tenants are precious and hard to find. Property managers know how to find them! 

One of the reasons most property owners want to hire a property manager in Branson is to ensure that their properties are properly managed. Moreover, they can help find trustworthy and reliable tenants. 

As a property owner, you want to make your property manager or landlord responsible for finding a good tenant. Often, this involves many dealings through a group of prospective tenants to find potential renters. When you want to look for tenants who are reliable and trustworthy, check out these guidelines.

Improve Your Rental Property

A property manager in Branson can help your rental properties in finding great tenants. But first, you need to do some improvements to your rental property. It's not going to be easy to find good tenants if you have a poor-looking property. This only means that you need to improve your property by swapping out old carpets with new ones, replacing old appliances, or applying a fresh coat of paint. You could also do a thorough cleaning, especially before posting a photo of your property for advertisement.

Advertise Through the Right Channels

You may want to look for a better way on how you could find a prospective tenant. One of the effective ways is placing an advertisement through the right channels. There's a chance that you can find prospective tenants online through real estate websites like Zillow, Apartments.com, and Rentals.com. 

These sites usually charge a small fee per listing. Remember that a good tenant won't be looking for rentals on free websites since many scammers use a site that doesn't charge a single fee. Another fruitful way to market your rental property is to post an ad in a local newspaper, distribute flyers, or post your ad on community boards.

Have Prospects Fill Out a Rental Application

When you receive inquiries from prospective tenants about your rental property, collect some information from them by letting them fill-up an application form. Make sure you get from them the following details that include names of applicants, prior address, children's name (if any), pet details (number of pets and breed), sources of income and amounts, employer's contact information, previous landlord's contact information, driver's license number, social security number, and personal references. The information you ask from a prospective tenant can be sensitive, so make sure to practice confidentiality and professionalism.

Screen Your Prospects

One of the most important aspects of finding a good renter is to conduct a thorough screening. When you screen a prospective tenant, it usually involves their employment history, rental history, credit score, criminal history, and references. This screening process will allow you to find potential tenants.

You may ask yourself about "how you can find my tenant's history?" Use the information of a prospective tenant you have from a rental application form. You can find services that offer to check criminal histories and credit scores for free. About their employment history, you can directly contact their current and past employers. The same with the personal references – you can ask them to make sure they are not related. In checking rental history, you can contact the previous landlords of the prospective tenant.

Set Up a Meeting Before Signing the Lease

When you want to assess a prospective tenant's personality and behavior, make sure to schedule a face-to-face meeting. Because you will be dealing with the tenant for a long time, so it's important to feel how they act before signing the lease agreement. This will give you the chance to ask critical questions such as: Why do you want to move? Or How long do you plan to live in a rental property?

Ensure Payment Before Giving the Keys

Before you allow any tenant to move in, you need to ask for the first month's rent and a security deposit as a standard procedure. This means that you don't hand over the keys unless you receive the asking payments. And if it's not cash, but instead a check, make sure to wait until after the checks are cleared before giving them the rental unit's keys.

Don't Settle or Rush Into Things

If you want to ensure getting the right tenants to your rental property, don't rush into things. Searching for the right tenant and conducting a screening process take much of your time, so you don't rush with it. It would be unwise to sign with the first inquirer that contacts you – unless they pass the screening process. Rushing things will only increase your chances of getting a bad tenant.

Looking for trustworthy and reliable tenants can be challenging, especially if you haven't done it before. When it comes to finding the best tenants for your rental property, you can never go wrong if you entrust a property manager in Branson.

Thousand Hills Realty is the premier property management company in the Branson, MO and Hollister, MO areas. If you would our help finding new reliable tenants for your investment property, call us today at (417) 337-8081. We would love the opportunity to speak with you about the services we offer!