Sourcing Tenants With An Agent | Bosley Real Estate

Right now, Ontario’s rental landscape is competitive. With a general shortage of housing inventory province-wide, owning an investment property is an increasingly lucrative endeavour.

While a surplus of tenants searching for housing does introduce some advantages for property owners – such as rising rent averages, it can also make the process of finding the perfect tenant more challenging. Thankfully, there’s a solution.

As a landlord in Ontario, you can automate the tenant-sourcing process by working with a real estate agent.

At Bosley, we offer specialized services to support landlords of all sizes. Whether you’re a first-time investor with a newly-built basement suite or a full-time landlord with dozens of properties, we do all the legwork on your behalf, taking the stress out of finding an A+ tenant.

Here’s how

Property Exposure

The first stage of finding a great tenant is maximizing your pool of applicants. Today, most renters begin their search online. So if you want to reach as many high-quality candidates as possible, ensuring your property has a strong digital presence is essential. Bosley can create a dedicated online listing for your rental unit, and incorporate other marketing strategies to help get the word out. With more exposure, your property will attract a higher volume of interested tenants, giving you a greater opportunity to find the best possible person.

Our team also represents tenants across Ontario in their property searches. When your property matches the needs of one of our refined clients, we ensure they know about it.

In-Person Tenant Screenings

In-person screenings are one of the most essential steps in finding a reliable, high-quality tenant for your property. Screenings allow landlords to ask questions, discuss expectations, and get an overall sense of a tenant’s personality, intentions, and qualifications.

While screenings are super important, they’re also incredibly time-consuming. Not only does meeting a potential tenant in person require a lot of your time, but the process of arranging and scheduling appointments can be outright stressful. Partnering with Bosley allows you to reap all the benefits of in-person tenant screenings, without any of the effort, time, or stress. In addition to scheduling and performing screenings on your behalf, we have the experience and industry expertise to ensure all the important details are covered.

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Credit Checks & Employment Verification

As a landlord, the last thing you want is a tenant who can’t make their rent. Therefore, it’s absolutely critical to ensure potential tenants can provide proof of income and employment. When you work with Bosley, we verify these details on your behalf, sourcing relevant documentation and speaking with their employer directly to confirm the provided details.

While verifying income and employment is an important step, it doesn’t always show the full picture of a person’s financial health. For that, you’ll want to perform a credit check. Checking a potential tenant’s credit offers you important insights into their borrowing history, track record of repayment, and any existing debts they may have. Similar to employment checks, we can take care of this step for you, saving you time and effort.

References

After speaking to a potential tenant in person, performing a credit check, and verifying their employment, you’ll want to speak to their references. Like screenings, this step is fairly involved as you’ll need to coordinate and make time for (often multiple) conversations. Once again, working with an agent can help you bypass the legwork of this process.

Our reference checks are in-depth, leaving no important information on the table. We speak to a potential tenant’s current property manager, as well as other landlords they’ve had in the past. During this stage, we verify crucial information about candidates, from payment timeliness to the condition their previous property was left in, and anything else you may want to know.

The Other Perks of Working With an Agent

There are a lot of legalities and fine print that come with being a landlord in Ontario. Potential mistakes could land you in financial or regulatory hot water. The best way to avoid these risks is by working with an expert. At Bosley, we can advise you on best practices for tenant management, ensuring you’re informed and up-to-date on all relevant laws and regulations.