Becoming A Homeowner

Posted on: 23 April 2019

When it comes to making money with rental properties, one of the key things you must focus on is keeping your units rented at all times. While it is impossible to have them rented all the time, you should focus on decreasing vacancy cycles, and here are several things to understand about vacancy cycles in the rental property industry.

What is a vacancy cycle?

With rental properties, there are always times when units are vacant, and this is primarily due to the fact that tenants will move out and work must be done to prepare the units for the next tenants. There are also vacancy cycles due to the time needed to find new tenants for unoccupied units. A vacancy cycle refers to the number of days a unit is unoccupied in between tenants, and this is something you should keep track of in your rental property business.

Why should decreasing vacancy cycles be a top priority?

As the owner of rental properties, your profitability relies on receiving rental income from all the units you have. If you have units sitting vacant, you will not be collecting any rental income from these units. In other words, an unoccupied unit is a loss of income. Because of this, you should aim to reduce the vacancy cycles as much as possible. If it currently takes you 30 days to get a new tenant in a unit, try finding ways to decrease this to 15 days. If you can do this, you lose out only on 15 days of rent instead of 30.

How can you decrease vacancy cycles?

There are numerous ways to decrease vacancy cycles, including the following methods:

Find better tenants — Good tenants will not suddenly move out or skip out on paying you rent. They will give you plenty of notice, and they will take better care of the apartments they rent, leaving you with less work to do to prepare the units.

Keep up on maintenance — If you can keep up on the maintenance of all your units, you will have less to do each time a tenant moves out, as you will have already completed work on the unit needed.

Hire a property management company — The other good method you should consider using is hiring a property manager to help you manage your units. Property managers are great at reducing vacancy cycles, as they know this highly affects the profitability of rental properties.

If you cannot seem to find a way to keep your units full and reduce vacancy cycles, it might be time to hire a company for help, and you can do this by contacting a local property management firm.