Avoid These 4 Things When Buying a Rental

These are the four things you want to avoid when investing in a rental property. So number one, one is going to be one bedroom units. Now, one bedrooms typically means a condo, a townhome, maybe even a small house. But these are typically harder to rent because there just isn't as much demand and there's much more turnover. And we know life happens and one bedroom tenants typically are in some transitional phase of their life. So that typically means shorter lease terms more turnover, less demand. And we recommend staying away from one bedrooms on a long term basis. Now, there's always situations where you may find a great deal, but overall, in your long term vision, your investment vision, you're going to want to stay away from those one bedrooms on a long-term basis. So number two. Now, just like we don't want one bedrooms, we also don't want six bedroom homes. Why? Because they're harder to rent. And if you own a very large house with a lot of bedrooms, like a six bedroom house, who are you going to attract? Well, that's going to be big families or just lots of people in that property.

Now, those are harder to rent. And ideally, you're going for the largest market segment you can for your property. So ideally, you want the three to four bedroom properties. The demand is much higher for those. But with large properties comes too much square footage to maintain. You're going to have a high potential for turnover costs because of that. And we recommend staying away from those one bedrooms and staying away from the too many bedrooms as well. So number three. Number three is going to be high maintenance landscape. Look outside of the home. Sometimes as investors, we forget to do this. You may have a single family property, the tenant moves out. She's been a great tenant had been there for almost 10 years, but she had somewhat neglected the landscape on the outside of the property. Not terribly so, but you can have up ending having to pay a lot of money to replenish things and bring things back to a high quality condition on that landscape. Now, ideally, you want as close to zero scape as possible, things that you don't have to put money into, nothing that grows or at least minimal growth on that.

And that's hard to do in Spokane, I understand. But if you have a property that you're going to rent out and it has a high maintenance landscaper, really expensive landscaping, be prepared because that's not ideally what you want to have in your rental property. You want things that are easy to maintain, that don't take a lot of time, effort, energy, or money to do that. All right, so number four is going to be a unique design or unique colors in your property. Now, this can be potentially changed, especially with colors. But if you're going to be renting it out and the colors are like maybe you got a navy blue bathroom, that may not be the most popular thing with your tenants. So you want to get back to a very neutral color palette as it relates to that. But if you're purchasing a rental property, stay away from things that are unique. If you walk into a property and think, Gosh, this is odd, this is unique, this is strange, that's probably not going to have the highest rental demand. Why? Because people don't want to live in unique odd, strange places. They want normal.

So we want to give them the properties that are much more straightforward and standardized as possible. So what do we want to do? We want to play the odds. That means you want to be aware of what the majority of renters want in a rental property. And from a A year percentage basis, that majority of renters are looking for is a three bed, two bath, two car garage with a basement and a fenced backyard, a single family home. That's it in a decent area. Schools are a plus if you can get into a good school area. That's what the majority of tenants are looking for, and you want to attract long term quality residents in your properties. Now, sometimes it's not always the case. There are going to be exceptions to every rule, but as you grow your real estate portfolio and as you purchase your rental properties, find the properties that attract the highest percentage of quality tenants. It's going to help you rent the property faster. It's going to keep them occupied for a longer period of time, help your residents, and help you. If you've got any questions, if you're looking at a potential rental property, we're happy to do a free rental analysis on it to let you know exactly how much you can rent it for.