How To Price Your Rental Home [Video]

PmDave: How do you price your rentals?

Dan Daugherty: There is lots of things, I’ll name some. School district; for example Cherry (Creek) School District down here in Centennial and Englewood add a lot of value to the property – so that is something I would concentrate on. People will want to pay more (rent) in the Cherry Creek School Districts.

You look at maintenance, do you have a condo or a town home where you are paying HOA fees that maintain the property for you that is maybe added in to the rental price.

What kind of amenities come with the rental price for example I have a townhouse in Englewood area that has pools that has a gym, indoor basketball courts – people are willing to pay more for those types for amenities.

Look at the property itself, is it nice, is it up to date, is it painted, is the carpet cleaned, wood flooring, granite counter tops in the kitchen. Do we are replace all the windows with brand new windows – things like that effect the evaluation of the property also effects the evaluation of the rental price of what you can get.

We also take a look at what rent is going for around that area (comparables) we use tools like RentBits.com has an average rental price tool we use Oodle.com has an average rental price tool Zilpy.com that has average rental rates tool.

So those are the sort of things we look at to see if it makes sense. We also look at the saturation of the (rental) market. If you love Washington Park (Denver trendy area), drive by Washington Park and see how many For Rent signs you see – there is actually quite a bit.

PmDave: Put a sign out front and it is gone in two days.

Dan Daugherty: No, well it is, but if you drive by you for rent sign after for rent sign. Extremely saturated. But as a real estate investor – buying a property right now in Washington Park for $800,000 to get $2,000 a month in rent doesn’t make sense. If you would have bought 10 years ago at $150,000 it makes perfect sense. I think that is what a lot of people are doing, no longer living there, they are renting it out so it does go by fast, so does Cherry Creek. But being a real estate investor I would not go in to those areas right now because it is too expensive.

Las Cruces