Just like every business, real estate rentals can experience bad business seasons. However, finding ways to keep your rental business afloat despite challenges is vital to ensure your success. Knowing how to generate additional income from rental property is the best way to do that.

As a landlord, improving the marketability of your rentals is the key to increase your profit, attract potential clients, and conduct impressive walkthroughs.

Charging higher rent is not as simple as randomly deciding to increase it. Other than ensuring that your price increase doesn’t go beyond what the law allows, you also have to justify it to your potential or current clients so that you will maintain your reputation as an honorable landlord. You can’t put a price on your integrity.

A great basis in determining your unit’s rental value depends on the quality of indoor living that it can give your tenants. Yes, external factors like location and economic status still come into play, but ultimately it will depend on whether your tenants will see that they’ll get their money’s worth if they rent from you.

There are different ways of adding real value to your leased properties that could justify your rent increase. These suggestions require different amounts of additional capital and effort, but all of them will surely do wonders for your business.

Deep cleaning

You’d be surprise how intensive cleaning can make your units look brand new. This is not just sweeping floors or wiping windows. Deep cleaning is more meticulous and detailed, making sure to clean every nook and cranny, even unexposed areas like ceiling fan blades. You can hire professional cleaners if you want it to be thoroughly done.

Repainting

A fresh coat of paint is also a no-brainer option if you want to see visible change to your property. This could also be a good option if you are trying to market your units to a specific clientele because you can base your new color schemes modifications on design styles that attract them the most.

Adding appliance or furniture

This can be done even when you already have a tenant. If a tenant requests you to add a furniture or appliance (e.g. washing machine) to your unit, you’ll no longer need to justify your rent increase to them since they were the ones who proposed to add the extra feature. You’d be surprise how much some tenants are willing to pay for their comfort and convenience.

If your units are still unoccupied, you can research on what appliances or apartment fixtures tenants tend to look for in a future home. If it adds great value to their life, they’ll be willing to pay higher rent.

You can also upgrade existing appliance or furniture and sell the old ones. This is a good choice to make while the ones you currently have are still in good condition. It would be harder (if not impossible) for you to sell if you wait for them to be completely worn out. You’re going to eventually replace it in the next years anyway, so might as well make some money from it to lessen the additional capital you’ll need in order to buy new ones.

Restore, Renovate, Revamp

This option is way more expensive than the others, but it will justify a higher rent increase. For instance, for large apartments, putting up a wall to add another room gives you reasonable cause to increase rent even by twenty to thirty percent. You can also just revamp the old kitchen or bathroom.

Extreme renovations would require large capitalization but if you think it’s a worthwhile investment and you have extra money lying around, you can go for it.

Attractive listings

After all the physical changes you make to your unit, you still wouldn’t enjoy the benefits unless you won’t catch a potential tenant’s attention.

Before you start marketing your rentals, make sure that your listings can give a good first impression. It must contain professionally captured photographs of your unit and must include well-written descriptions that promote all selling points like new features and appliances.

Once your listing’s all set, post them on listings syndication and management platforms like Padleads.com, where they can be syndicated to famous rental sites. Padleads lets you post high-quality photos and emphasize the best features of your units. That way, you have higher chances of getting leads that actually convert to closed deals.