How to Find Rental Comps

One of the key steps to analyzing a rental property is to understand how much the property will rent for. If you are not an experienced investor and are just starting out this may seem like a challenging task. How in the world do you know how much your property will rent for? This task is actually really simple and I am going to cover how to do it in this post.

Call a property manager

One of the easiest ways with the least amount of work involved is to call a property manager. These professionals are trained to analyze properties and know exactly how to figure out how much to charge for a rental. Call up a local property manager and see what they believe your property would go for. Some property managers are willing to do this for free but don’t take advantage of these people. Property managers are running a business so treat them as you would anyone else. Compensate them for their time and if they did a good job refer them out to other people.

Zillow

My personal favorite way to figure out how much a property will rent for is to use Zillow. It is free and easy to do. Go to the rental section of Zillow and look for similar homes as yours. This means that you’ll look for homes that are for rent in your area, one’s with similar amounts of square footage, and ones with similar amounts of bedrooms and bathrooms.

I’ll give an example of a 2 bedroom 1 bathroom home in my area. I searched the area and found lots of similar rentals. I found three 2 bedrooms 1 bathrooms listed for $1,800, another for $1200 and one more for $1300. I found a 3 bedroom 1 bath for $1700. I also found a 1 bedroom 2 bathroom for $1300. Based on this information I would list my property for anywhere between $1700 and $1400. I don’t want my property to be the cheapest on the market and I also don’t want it to be the most expensive. I would probably put it up for rent at the higher end first and if it doesn’t get much action I would begin to drop the price lower.

I hope this post helps you out in your investing journey. I will continue to post more of these informational type posts in the future. Keep working hard!