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How to Keep Good Tenants by Channeling Santa, Slickdeals, Miss Cleo, and Ask Jeeves

Landlords spend a great deal of time, effort, and money trying to find the ideal tenants for their rental units. In most cases, landlords are having complete strangers move into their homes. Marketing the property, reviewing applications, screening credit and background histories, checking references, and negotiating appropriate lease terms are all necessary steps to decrease the risk of poor tenants, evictions, and vacancies. Even then, applicants who look perfect on paper may still turn out to be terrible tenants.

What many landlords seem to ignore is dedicating the same effort to retaining high quality tenants. Think about it. These tenants are no longer strangers in the sense that there is history of them paying rent on time, taking care of the property, and being respectful to neighbors. The risk is now much less than when they were applicants.

Landlords often make the mistake of thinking that just by doing their duties as defined in the lease, good tenants will stay.

No! Go above and beyond to retain them!

In a prior article, 7 Ways to Make Your Landlord Appreciate You, we provided tips to tenants on how to get in their landlords’ good graces. As we know, a harmonious landlord-tenant relationship must be a two-way street so how about on the landlord side? What can landlords do to keep good tenants?

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