Landlords - how often do you raise your rents?

I'll provide you a renter's perspective from someone that has rented in multiple states and always paid on-time/early. In most spots, after the first year of a lease, I will ask upon renewal if they are going to raise the rent. When they say no, I've ended up renting for another year. After 2 years some landlords have wanted to raise the rent by $100/month, but depending on the spot and negotiating, they've either kept the rent the same or I've bailed. It's all about negotiating if you have good tenants and want to keep them

4 or 5% every few years. we have great tenants in both our rental properties, so we don't want to push them out. One finally signed a 2yr lease and I didn't raise rent but will next lease renewal by 4 or 5%.

You can't put a price on piece of mind with great tenants. I've heard countless bad tenant horror stories. I'd prefer to keep good tenants around than price them out, as long as I'm maintaining at least a 15% margin. They're doing us a favor by building our equity and wealth, I can do them a favor by not breaking their bank or forcing them to pay for another move.

Are you near the university? At LSU, you know you’re under market rate if you start receiving multiple inquiries from old/expired listings.

If you can’t lean on a stream of students, you have to balance the potential headaches of the devil you don’t know by trying to squeeze higher rent.

In my experience it’s best to only raise rents when you change tenants. Most of my rentals are young tenants that aren’t there that long so raising the rent just pushes them to somewhere new.

I have a couple that have leased my condo for the past 4 years. Raised rent last year after the crazy insurance jump. They are looking to be there long term and are great tenants.

1k rent for house is insanely low. Your house must be in a terrible neighborhood

quote:

---

Insurance and repair costs have really jumped and I've bumped up rents across the board. A couple of people have moved and I had some vacancies. But they rented out at the higher rates in a few months.

---

You have to make sure the juice is worth the squeeze, though. Let's say rent is $1k and you want to bump it to $1,200. Tenant moves, and it takes you "a few months" (let's call that three) to rent it at the higher rate. Even ignoring the costs associated with getting the property ready for a new tenant, it's going to take you 15 months of the extra $200/mo to recuperate the $3k you lost by bumping the rent.

Obviously the math is going to work sometimes, but I would make sure the math really works before I went up on a good tenant.

quote:

---

I feel like new tenants is a game of Russian Roulette. A few hundred bucks aren’t worth the risk.

---

It seems like the reason a lot of people struggle with being a landlord is that what they want to put in and what they want to get out don't match. If you want to be a full time landlord who relies on it as their sole or primary source of income, feel free to be a hard-nosed bastard nickle and diming everyone. On the other hand, if this is just a side hustle, or even more so, "passive income", then you're probably going to need to internalize that your return is going to a bit lower than the "ideal", because the ideal requires more time and energy than you want to invest.

And for the record, there's nothing wrong with that. Being a full time landlord sounds horrific. But if a couple hundred bucks a month is going to make or break you such that you can't wait for the natural turnover point, it might be time to give the paradigm a bit of thought.

I am not an expert by any means here (no rentals), but I feel like raising rent in very small amounts would be a much better idea than someone planting themselves in there for 5-6-7 years and you never raise the rent. Now if you have paid off properties, not a big deal, but if you have someone who moved in 5 years ago, charge them say $2k/mo which is making you enough to pay the note off plus a very small "profit" (really just cover longer term expenses), would it be wise to keep it $2k/mo for the last 5 years and you end now in the red between tax/ins increases during that time?

Just on my personal home taxes will have gone up $2k since 2020 and the insurance has gone up a few hundred bucks. The note with escrow to cover that in theory will have gone up by $200/mo...so if you were charging $2k/mo 5 years ago and that barely covered the note/expenses, seems like it would have been wise to slightly raise rent, maybe $25-$50/mo increments year over year, where it wouldnt drive people away as much, than put yourself in the red eventually by never raising the rent. Raising it by $200 in one go would push a lot more people out feels like than raising slowly over time.

I get not wanting to chase someone good away, but if you have someone planted in there for a long time on a non paid off property, eventually you gotta raise the rent and you'd probably lose them if you raised it dramatically to make up for years of not doing it.