How should you price your rental?

As a professional property manager, I have had years of experience in pricing rentals.  The best and most obvious way I do it is to look at what has rented in the local area and how the property compares. I also look at how long the comparative properties took to rent and the time of the year.  In my experience, the Brevard county rental market slows down around the holidays.  So a property that may rent for $1,000 in July or August, may only rent for $900 (or less) in November.  This may not always be the case, but more often than not, it is. 

I have had owners that have a rental price in their head, that they must have.  If this price is higher than what the market reflects, it usually takes a lot longer to rent it. I have had experience with owners that would not budge on their price, and had the property sitting empty, with no rental income at all for several months. They end up eventually lowering the price or negotiating down to the market price anyway. They don’t realize that they lost more in those few months the property did not rent, then they would have had they have rented it at the market price to begin with. 

I have also had owner that wanted to price their property so high above the market price that I have had to decline listing the property. It would have been a waste of everybody’s time and in most cases those are the owners who would be calling and complaining that their property hasn’t rented. For me it is just not worth it. 

If a property is priced correctly, it should rent relatively quickly and the owner should start receiving rental income in a shorter amount of time.