Getting Into Brookline Property Management? You Better Get This One Step Right
The key to Brookline property management (or any location) is finding the right tenants
It’s no secret: Brookline has become a residential hotspot for young professionals, families, and everyone in between. With a lower cost of living than downtown Boston or Cambridge, a quick commute, upcoming restaurants, and a quieter atmosphere—it has a lot going for it.
As such, Brookline property management is attracting new investors, property owners, and a whole lot of tenants. But with all this activity, we feel the need to point out one thing to the newcomers out there. Ask any experienced property manager what the most crucial, make-or-break part of renting a property is, and they’ll all tell you the same thing…
FINDING GOOD TENANTS!
(Especially in bustling neighborhoods like Brookline!)
Good tenants will make your life a breeze. Bad tenants can turn your life into a living nightmare. Seriously, we sometimes have nightmares about bad tenants, but thankfully, they’re only in our dreams. In real life, our clients have great tenants because we do our homework and have a number of built-in precautions that weed out problems before they occur. This allows us to easily select the best tenants available.
Curious how we do it? Read on to find out.
Incentives for rental agents
To find the best tenants, you need a rental agent who has a vested interest in putting the right tenant in your unit—not just the first one that applies. Your average rental agent is going to disappear after they’ve found someone for your unit, so it doesn’t make a difference to them whether the tenant is destroying your house with massive parties or relaxing every night in front of the TV.
The best way to avoid this is to work with a full-service property management company who has a vested interest in putting the right tenants in the properties they’re managing.
At Mergo, we handle all brokerage in house. This means that when we look for tenants, we know that we’re going to have to deal with them for the entire year. As such, we are always looking for the best tenants to make our lives easier. In fact, bad tenants don’t even affect our clients because we’re the ones that have to deal with all the issues they create. So it’s always in our best interest to find the absolute best tenants for your properties.
Getting your message out there
In order to find the best tenants, you need to cast a wide net. It’s pretty straightforward—you’ll never find the best people if you can’t reach them. That’s where marketing comes in. When renting out a Brookline property, you need to be hitting all of the outlets available to you—that means posting them on the MLS (multiple listing service), as well as services like Zillow, HotPads, Zumper, Apartments.com, Trulia, and more.
When it comes to Brookline—and any location in the Greater Boston Area—posting on the MLS is most important, because it puts your property in front of every licensed agent in the city. The only catch is that you have to be a licensed agent yourself to post it!
At Mergo, we post all of our units on the MLS and use software to post to every major online service automatically. From there, we scan all applicants and work to find the best ones. This is a significant advantage of working with a full-service property management company, as this can be a time-consuming and expensive process to handle on your own.
Our vetting process
Once we’ve found some strong candidates, the vetting process begins. This is where you might find some surprises. It’s easy to make a good impression for a walk-through, but the real truth comes out when you get everything down on paper.
To properly vet our candidates, we get a photo ID, credit report, income verification, tax statements, Rental Housing Association (RHA) application, past landlord references, and a deposit for the first month’s rent. Yeah, it’s a lot—but it’s worth it.
Once we have all of that, we review everything to look for potential issues. If anything feels off, they’re not the right candidate. There’s no beating around the bush here—this is an intense process that takes time. But time spent here is well worth it because it prevents bigger problems from occurring in the future.
This is yet another reason that many property owners opt to work with a full-service management company like Mergo. We handle this entire process for our clients and send them a short synopsis of each qualified candidate after we’ve reviewed all of the documents mentioned above. That way, our clients can pick whomever they prefer while knowing that every candidate that crosses their desk is already going to be a good fit.
If you’re interested in getting involved in Brookline property management or need help finding the best tenants for your property, get in touch! We’d love to help you find a great tenant and take property management off your plate.
