What Should I Charge for Rent?

Nearly every owner who calls us opens with some version of this question, and most have already looked up a number online. That number is usually wrong, and it is usually wrong in the same direction.

Active listings tell you what hasn't rented

The rental prices you see on the big portals are asking prices on properties that are still sitting there. A home that leased last week is off the site. What remains is, disproportionately, the inventory the market has declined at that price.

Pricing off active listings therefore inherits the optimism of every landlord who overpriced. It is the single most common mistake we see, and it is expensive, because an empty house costs full rent every month while you discover the error.

What you want instead is closed leases — properties that actually signed, at what actually got paid, recently, near you.

What a real comparison adjusts for

A closed lease two streets over is a starting point, not an answer. Two homes of the same square footage can support meaningfully different rents. The things that move the number in our markets:

• Square footage and bedroom count, obviously — but bedroom count matters more than raw footage, because it changes who can apply
• Garage, and whether it's usable as a garage or has been converted
• Lot size and yard condition, which matters more in the Inland Empire than it does closer to the coast
• Air conditioning and its age, which in Riverside, Hemet, and Perris is not a luxury feature
• Condition at showing — flooring, paint, kitchen and bath age
• School boundary, which can differ between two homes on the same street

The last fifty dollars usually costs you money

Owners tend to optimize the monthly figure. The arithmetic that matters is annual, and vacancy dominates it.

Work it through on your own property. Take the monthly rent you're considering and divide by four — that's roughly what one extra week of vacancy costs. Now ask how many extra weeks on market it would take to give back the increase you were chasing. On most single-family homes in our markets, pushing for an extra fifty dollars a month and sitting two extra weeks is a losing trade for the first year, and you've also selected for a tenant who had fewer options.

This is the reason we would rather price a home correctly and lease it in two weeks than list high and negotiate down after a month of showings. The second path looks more ambitious and produces less money.

Condition moves the number more than owners expect

Two identical floor plans, one with fresh paint and clean flooring and one without, do not rent for the same amount, and they do not rent in the same timeframe. The gap is frequently larger than the cost of the paint.

Before you set a price, it's worth knowing which improvements actually return their cost at your rent level and which are money you will not see again. That answer varies by market — what pays for itself on a Rancho Cucamonga home does not necessarily pay for itself in Hemet.

Why we won't quote your rent over the phone

An instant estimate from a website — ours included, if we offered one — is an average of properties that are not yours. It has never seen your kitchen, your yard, or the fact that your street backs onto a school.

We pull closed comps for your specific address, adjust them for the things above, and give you a range with the reasoning attached. If the honest answer is lower than you hoped, you get that answer. An owner who prices off a flattering number and sits vacant for six weeks has been poorly served, not well served.

Send us the address and we'll come back with a real range and what's behind it.