Eliminate panic and feel safe knowing you’ve found a good tenant.

Just starting out as a new landlord and wondering how to find a good tenant.

Or already an established landlord but keep finding that your tenants are unreliable, untidy, and serial non-payers of rent? 

Eliminate panic and feel safe knowing you’ve found a good tenant.

Here are 5 tips to help you on your way.

1. Easy to deal with?  

Is your potential new tenant easy to deal with, or are they highly strung?  

If they are highly strung, they will probably remain that way throughout your dealings, making them difficult to work with and far from the ideal tenant.    

You want to let to someone who is easy to talk to, who is polite and friendly, and who shows a keen interest in your property and its surrounding locality.

• Punctual

Schedule a mutually convenient time to meet at your property and keep an eye on whether the person turns up on time or not. Also, how do they present themselves? Someone who arrives on time and appears well-kept is more likely to respect your time and property.

• References 

Landlord references are an excellent way to find out whether a tenant has historically paid the rent on time and whether there have been any prior issues that you should be aware of.

Personal references are also an excellent way to discover personality traits that are preferable to you. Such a reference should be from someone, not a relative of the person enquiring about becoming your tenant, though.  

• Salary 

Check that the potential new tenant can afford to pay the rent. The ideal would be that they earn at least 3 times the rent that you seek.

• Credit score 

Even if the potential new tenant can afford to pay, if they have a low credit score and a CCJ, they may not be good with money, and there’s a real risk that they may fall into rent arrears at some point.

Bonus tips!

1. Once you’ve found your ideal tenant, get them to sign a tenancy agreement that will protect both your interests and your tenant’s.

• Get a check-in inventory report prepared so that you can provide evidence that your property and any furniture that you let it with was in good condition at the outset.

• Register your tenant’s deposit in a tenancy deposit scheme within 30 days and provide your tenant with the prescribed information. Remember, if you do not do this, your tenant could sue you for up to 3 times the deposit they paid. 

If you would like an informal chat about any of the information in this post, contact us, and we can arrange a time that works best for you.