Five things you must do before renting out your home

Are you considering renting out your home to make a side income but have never done it before and don’t know where to start? Do you want to know what you should do before renting your home?

Renting out your property could be one of the best decisions and is a great way to make an additional income to support your family. However, note that there are a few things that you need to do before you rent out your home for the process to be as seamless and easy as possible.

If you are curious about renting your home or planning on doing it in the future, here are five things you must do before renting out your home.

1) Hire a property management company

When renting out your home, one of the first things you should do is hire a property management company that will be able to help you with the process.

Property management companies or letting agents are professionals in renting out properties, and they will be able to help you with the entire process of renting out your property from beginning to end. Make sure to ask around or search online for ‘Edinburgh letting agents‘ (or amend this search to your area) for reliable property management companies, based on reviews and experience.

Not only will a professional property management company be able to help you find the best potential tenants, but they will also handle the paperwork and communicate with the tenant as needed. They can even handle maintenance and repairs along the way if you ask them.

Hiring a property management company is one of the best ways to ensure you are following all of the rules of renting your property or home, and they can make the process as seamless and simple as possible. Essentially, they will handle the whole process.

2) Screen potential tenants

One of the most important things you need to do when renting out your home is to screen your potential tenants properly. If you hire a property management company or a letting agent, they will be able to help you with this process.

Screening potential clients means doing background checks, seeing what they would be like as tenants, looking at their credit score to know if they can reasonably pay for the rent, and more. When screening potential tenants, you also want to ensure that you can have a good relationship with them.

3) Make appropriate repairs

Before you even look for a letting agent or property management company, you first need to make the appropriate repairs to your property so that it is rent-friendly and ready to be rented out.

This could mean repainting the walls, changing the lights and lighting fixtures, making sure that everything is fixed and that there is nothing broken throughout the house, and ensuring that the house is safe to live in.

4) Ensure the property is secure

Not only should you make all of the necessary repairs and fixes to any damage on the property, but you should also ensure that your property is fully secured, especially if it is in a neighborhood that could be considered dangerous.

Ensuring property security could mean everything from installing an alarm system to something as simple as ensuring that all of the locks are functional end work properly. By ensuring that the property is safe and secure, you are more likely to find tenants willing to live on the property and even pay a higher price for rent.

5) Get insurance

Last but not least, the final thing you need to do before renting out your home is to get insurance. Even though you would have fully screened your tenants and ensured they are the best fit for your property, there is always a risk that there could be damage to your property, whether it is fire, water damage, or something else.

It is essential to have the right insurance for your home so that should something go wrong, you are fully insured, and nothing will have to come out of pocket.