We had a landlord call the office today asking why his apartments haven’t rented yet. That sparked me to look at the rental deals we had closed over the last 3 months to try and find any trends as to why some apartments rent and why some don’t.

I wanted to see if any of these deals had anything in common with each other. Going through the database I found a couple of trends that popped up. You might think that they had to do with certain areas of town and how much the rent was. You’d be mistaken.

Here are the 4 reasons why these units rented. (In order of importance)

1) The landlord gave us keys or put a lock box on the property.
2) The landlord gave us the current tenant’s phone numbers.
3) We had taken video of the unit
4) We had taken pictures of the unit.

After running all the closed deals through our database to check these points I found that 84% of these deals had met all 4 of the points above and that 95% of these deals had met points 1 and 2.

The moral of the story, make your unit easy to show and it will rent! It seems like every two months we are adding another shelf to the key closet. Currently we have over 1300 keys (not including master keys and luxury buildings), these landlords get it.

They make it easy for us to show or collect video/pictures which, in return, gets the unit rented a lot faster than trying to setup a time with the landlord.

Lesson: When you call to yell at us that your unit hasn’t rented – give us a set of keys and a week!

Filed under: Boston Home Buying Tips