16 January 2019
 Categories: Real Estate, Blog

With rental properties, one of the key factors that will affect your profitability is the length of your vacancy cycles. A vacancy cycle refers to the amount of time between when one tenant moves out and the next tenant moves in. The goal with rental properties is to decrease this time span, as it can have a great impact on the profitability of your rental properties.

Why you cannot avoid vacancy cycles

There is nothing you can do as a landlord to avoid vacancy cycles with your business, as there will always be tenants moving out and new ones moving in, but you can control the length of this time. The only way you could ever avoid these is if you find tenants that choose to live in their units for the rest of their lives, but this is very rare with people who rent apartments.

Why you should aim for short vacancy cycles

The purpose of aiming for short vacancy cycles is to decrease the amount of time you are not collecting money. Each day a unit is vacant is a day you lose rental income. If you lose just one or two days of rental income, this may not affect your budget a lot; however, if you lose a month of rental income each time a tenant moves out, you could lose a lot of money. Because of this, your aim should be to have the shortest vacancy cycles as possible.

How you can accomplish shorter vacancy cycles

There are several different things you can do to shorten the vacancy cycles you experience, including the following:

1. Choose better tenants. If you can find good tenants to rent to, you can shorten vacancy cycles in several ways. First of all, the tenants might stay there longer. Secondly, the tenants would leave their units in rentable condition, which means you would not have to spend weeks fixing problems and preparing the units.
2. Keep up with maintenance. You can also reduce the vacancy cycles by keeping up with the maintenance of the units while they are being lived in instead of waiting to do the work until the tenants move out.
3. Hire a property manager. Finally, you can hire a property management firm to help you with this, as they are experts with all facets of rental property management.

If you need some help decreasing your vacancy cycles or with other aspects of your rental property business, contact a property management business.