What’s your style? Down home, uptown, good old boy (or girl), or your own special individual self? Sales gurus might want you to use “techniques,” but people don’t like to be “techniqued.” They get the uneasy feeling they’re being hoodwinked.
So while sales training is important, canned, inveigling presentations don’t get your rental properties rented. You do, using whatever style comes naturally to you.
That doesn’t mean you don’t need to be professional. Good tenants like to rent from professionals, and bad tenant avoid them like they would provoked fire ants. But you can be professional and still use your own style. So be natural, and accordingly, believable and successful.
Being a professional at renting properties, says John Maciha, 25-year veteran of managing 10,000 apartment units, means you do the following:
Be a good listener
Understand the needs of your potential tenant
Fit those needs to the product you are selling
Know all the features of your rental properties
Know your city
Understand the demographics of both your rental properties and the surrounding areas
Go the extra mile
Be enthusiastic
Be confident and self-assured
Be yourself
Care!
All of those mean you put your applicants’ needs first.
In many markets today an abundance of choices face prospective tenants, but they pick one place to live over all the others. For a highly-qualified applicant to decide to move into your rental property there has to be something that sets you and your property above everything else.
Often the features are the same, often the neighborhoods are all but identical, often the properties are of equal quality, yet something makes an applicant sign on the dotted line for one over another.
The reasons differ for every person, but often it has to do with how they relate to the landlord. People like to do business with people they like and trust. Tenants like landlords who seem to put the needs of the customer first; you do that through careful attention to the list above.
Remember, when you are looking for tenants, you are selling them on living in your rental property.
You want applicants who are eager to live in your properties. Your job is to help them make the decision that you and your properties are the right decision. Use your own style, but let prospective tenants know that renting from you would be a darned sight better than from one of those unprofessional landlords.