Renting the apartment

I assumed that renting out an apartment would be difficult. Well it isn't, but I don't know yet about the paper work.

Just to avoid confusion, I am renting my apartment out to somebody else.

It might wise to provide some background. It just happens to be so that my wife lives abroad now and all our stuff is moved there by a moving company. (By the way, I have to write about this too some time. Funny things happened.)

So, nowadays I'm living in a big flat alone and with little furniture... actually only a sofa, a table, and a mattress. This is why I decided to rent out my apartment and move to a small studio until I find the job i really want from the country where my wife is.

As I am very lazy starting some projects I just talked about the whole situation to some friends when I happened to meet them. Of course I also mentioned that I'm going to rent out the apartment. What happened was that a lot of friends knew people needing an apartment.

My needs as a landlord are:

1. The tenant stays in my flat at least 3 years (or tries to stay)
2. The tenant is reliable and references are good
3. The rent is high enough, but a bit lower than average

There are reasons for those needs. I'm willing to lower the price in order to attract the tenant to be happy and stay longer. Because I'm going to be abroad it would be difficult to arrange a new tenant (somehow I forgot that one of my friends has a business for people like me, but now I know it) and if I lose e.g. one month's rent in the process, it will cost me more than keeping a bit lower price.

Because I will be abroad, I will also have to trust the tenant. I don't want that my 1-year-old apartment is trashed when we come back.

For these reasons I chose a tenant whose mother I know. I can call her if something is wrong... I know that I don't have to because the knowledge of this possibility is a quite powerful tool to prevent "mistakes".

What's interesting: When I met the tenant, actually a couple, I noticed that I was acting as a salesman even though that was not my intention. At least it worked and now we have agreed the rent (above my target price) and only the paper work remains to be done.

I have been thinking about my "natural salesman act" for a while. I have been selling 10 years now and training others to sell for 7 years and creating selling support tools for 7 years for managers, sales people etc. Yeah... I'm a rookie.

I think that the reason for automatic good sales process is not because of my sales experience. The reason is that I have been monitoring and developing my own "processes" all the time. Good sales practices just happen to sit so deep in my backbone that I don't realize it anymore.

This leads to the old fact in my words: If you don't monitor your own doings and develop them, you cannot change.

After thinking I noticed several other things which I have changed during years just by monitoring myself. One is listening even when I know the problem or question which is getting presented =)

What about the sales? I used my sales techniques to discover the customer needs. After that I pointed out the features in my apartment that would satisfy the customer needs. Interesting is that the customers didn't ask about the price until when they were leaving. I didn't tell them a price (I know, I know... make the buying easy) because I hadn't researched the market price levels at that point at all. I just said that it is below average and I'll return to that.

When I informed the price I made quite clear how big their annual saving vs. market prices will be. That's a lot larger figure than the monthly rent and it's even so big that I started to think about raising the price... but it's not wise to be greedy in this case =)

At the end we got what we wanted and they got what they wanted.

Now everybody thinks: Low price easy selling. That's right, but my target was to find a reliable tenant from my network and ensure long relationship. Financially changing tenant even once in 3 years would make me lose money even if the rent were market rent or above. Got the point?

In Paper Clip Factory we think: Fast wins are not always the biggest wins.