Following advice is not enough – rent your apartment to a trusted tenant and ensure guaranteed rent payment. Rendin gives you 10x protection compared to deposit and many other benefits.
1. Be vigilant with pricing
“Many landlords have been trying to price their apartment the same they did the last year or a couple of months ago just to find out in a couple of months after getting no interest that they’re not competitive with this price anymore,” Markowski says.
“To describe the situation in bigger detail, we can take 2 real-life examples from the Rendin platform. One is a freshly renovated apartment in Warsaw Jelonki district that was quickly rented out and had multiple candidates for 4000 PLN last year, but now has been looking for tenants for around a month with a price of 3600 PLN,” he exemplifies. The other example is from Wrocław where a nice centrally-located kawalerka dropped in price by almost 20% compared to last year to find any meaningful interest today.
Markowski suggests that the first good step in understanding whether the price is right is to use Rendin’s price calculator to verify that the price is between the high and low estimates for similar properties in the area. “It’s completely free and uses over 100 000 data points across Poland, but it’s especially accurate in bigger cities. It makes it easy to see whether compared to similar apartments yours is rather on the more expensive or the economic side,” says Markowski.
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In Poland, the rental laws favor the tenants, even in cases of fraud. At Rendin, we champion fairness for both parties! Our solution supports equitable rental relationships by providing landlords with:
Professional legal aid whenever they need it
Rent payment guarantee
Property damage reimbursement
We envision modern property renting as simple, accessible, and, most of all, secure for both landlords and tenants.
2. Put some effort into the listing itself
Markowski says that Rendin’s research shows that price and location are the two most important factors when it comes to picking a rental apartment. However, he says that once these big items are more or less the same, the landlord’s ability to sell the apartment to the tenant becomes important as well.
“We shouldn’t also underestimate the power of images on a listing site or in social media for example. Visuals catch our attention and are therefore a key factor in setting up a competitive listing,” he says. As an example, he brings out the recent trend of home staging (we’ve written more about that here), which is setting the images up in a homely setting so that it would invoke good feelings about the apartment in the potential tenant. “Often we don’t even have to go that far - it’s enough if the images are decent size, well-lit and show more than just one angle at the apartment,” Markowski points out.
3. Make costs cheaper for the tenant
As hinted before, the cost of the rental apartment is one of the biggest factors for tenants in their choice. One of the options to reduce it is to set the apartment at a reasonable price as hinted above, or to get rid of some additional fees that might be cumbersome to the tenant. “For example, in Warsaw we can see that properties that are in the 2000s ranges are getting a lot more interest than properties that are more expensive,” Markowski explains.
“That’s one of the reasons why Rendin is a deposit-free service in its essence - the landlords get a better, 10x higher protection from us, while the tenants have lower costs when starting to rent due to the lack of deposit. An apartment that would’ve cost 6000 PLN with the deposit, costs 3000 PLN without the deposit,” Markowski explains. The cost of the Rendin service is generally around 50-70 PLN per month, which can be either paid by the tenant, or the landlord or included in the rent.
He highlights that even though landlords might sometimes have fears that not asking for the deposit would bring along bad tenants who are not able to pay, the data doesn’t show that in any way. “We have guaranteed over ten thousand rental agreements across Poland and Estonia for several years already and thanks to our automated background check and experience, we can keep the number of problematic cases even lower than on the regular market, where the deposit is the security standard,” Markowski says.
Another option to increase the value of the property is to add something of extra value within the price. “This can be for example access to storage facilities in the building, a parking spot in an enclosed area or something else that isn’t usually guaranteed with all apartments such as an included internet service or something else,” Markowski says.
4. Use all possible free platforms to acquire candidates
Markowski explains that using different platforms to acquire interested people is also a key to finding a tenant in times when the supply is bigger. “Generally our customers say that they can find most people on Olx and local Facebook groups focused on renting apartments,” he says. “But it’s also a good idea to put the listing up on the Rendin platform as it’s completely free and all the candidates that apply go automatically through a financial background check.”
He highlights that using free channels is especially valuable in the current market state as it means that you can play more with the rent price over a longer time to test out the correct pricing or just wait for the perfect tenant for a longer time, without losing money on the advertising itself, which can be quite expensive on the bigger platforms.
5. Optimise for peace of mind, not yield
Another point Markowski points out that is especially suitable for landlords that have smaller portfolios or who have just single apartments that they’ve inherited is to just ditch maximizing the yield off the rental apartment and focus rather on finding a stable, long-term tenant over a longer period of time.
“Actually quite often people don’t calculate as cost their own time spent on managing the apartment, the time the apartment is tenantless, time spent on testing pricing, setting up listings on different websites and other things that take time. More often it’s easier and even financially more viable to keep the property rented out for a longer time rather than searching for a tenant every 6 months at a slightly higher price,” he says.
“Let’s take an example period of 1 year where the landlord is looking to rent out the property for 3000 PLN. They spend 1 month searching for the tenant, meaning that during this period they will make a total of 33000 PLN for the renting out (3000 monthly rent*12 months in a year -3000 PLN lost for 1 month searching for a tenant). On the other hand, they could’ve also rented it out with a monthly rent of 2750 PLN in a case where they didn’t spend a month looking for a tenant, leading to the exact same yearly revenue (2750 monthly rent* 12 months),” Markowski brings a simplified explanation. “Of course, real-world yield calculations are more complex than that, but it just shows that sometimes what seems like a lot more money doesn’t necessarily mean more money,” he stresses.
Check out Rendin platform already trusted by thousands of landlords and see how we can help you remain competitive also in the complex market situation. Read all about our service here.