RentoMeter
As a landlord you don’t want to be the highest rent in the market since it gives your tenants an incentive to look for cheaper alternative. At the same time, you also do not want to leave money on the table by charging too little rent.
To find a safe but maximum amount of rent to charge for your Los Gatos rental property you need some data on the what’s renting in your neighborhood.
In the past, you would need to pay for an expensive rental survey to find the range of rents within 2 mile radius of your rental property.
But thanks to a website called RentoMeter.com developing a rental survey is very simple and easy. The site allows you to input you to input your property info below:
1) Property Address
2) Number of Bedrooms
3) Expected or Desired Rent
Then the site display a round dial (seen in the image above) which shows where you expected rent ranks among the nearby properties. The Site uses a 0.6 mile radius to find similar homes using only the bedrooms to find the match!
The problem with the pricing model here is that caps the maximum number of bedrooms at 6 which means it’s not suitable for pricing multi-family or much larger homes that have more than 6 bedrooms. Finally, the site should include the number of bathrooms which in our opinion impacts the decision of tenants on the value for rent.
We tested the site with one of Rental properties in San Jose that we manage. We use $5,500 rent for desired Rent and got the following results:
- 60 6-bedroom rentals
- …in a 7.95 mile radius.
- Median rent: $4400
- Average rent: $4737
- 20th / 80th percentile: $2890/ $6275
- 10th / 90th percentile: $2688 / $7825
This is very good start for Landlord and property managers who might need to do a quick rental survey when they are assigned a new property. We do much more extensive Property Profile using County records which includes a Rental Market survey as well.
As you can see from the red dial, the 90th percentile of the rent is $7,825 but the maximum rent is shown as $9,650 but it’s well in the Red which might not be a wise marketing strategy for your rental.
What do you use to make your final decision on the rent?! Let us know.
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