It feels good to have a great tenant, doesn’t it? Even the most passive of real estate investors reap the benefits of a good tenant: they pay on time, take care of your investment property, and just make life a whole lot easier for everyone involved. When you manage to attract a stand-out tenant, you’ve got something special: period.

When you find something great, what do you do? You hold on to it, of course!

Remember: the vacancies between tenants are one of the most costly periods for real estate investors. So keeping those times down to a minimum with loyal, quality tenants is a strategy worth considering. Naturally, circumstances mean that you won’t always be able to hold on to a good tenant. People move for a lot of reasons that are beyond your control.

That said...from your end and through excellent property management, you can attract and keep quality tenants that will regret leaving and might just recommend your rental to someone else. But what are the best practices for getting great tenants to stick around anyway? These simple keys may help you better vet property management companies or improve on the systems you already have in place.

What makes a good tenant a happy tenant? This is a question everyone asks when real estate investing.  After all, when you have great tenants who pay on time and take care of your investment property, you want to keep them. Plenty of property managers and owners find themselves befuddled with a good tenant goes elsewhere.

Sometimes it feels like a futile struggle to get tenants to pay on time. Your property manager can send reminder after reminder in every way they can think of, from the spoken word, written note, email, text, tweet to smoke signals and semaphore...sometimes nothing seems to work!

When the rent payments come in late, it can be a real inconvenience to real estate investors — particularly those who own single-family properties.  At the same time, high turnover rates can be a killer for a real estate investor.  Both of these issues can easily be overcome with a few simple steps and "re-evaluation" of the owner/landlord/management/tenant relationship.

Let's face it: You probably don't have a monopoly on all the rental homes in your area. (If you do, please be kind enough to let us know where you live, so we can take some of that market share off your hands; you must be exhausted.) With so many other real estate investors competing for a limited pool of tenants, it's important to make yourself stand out from the crowd.  Here in Memphis we are managing right over 1,800 properties and, while that may seem like a massive number of properties, we are still a fraction of the total number of rental properties in the city.  Just this week, we have had several meetings to discuss stepping away from the "ordinary" and figuring out how to eliminate altogether properties that are vacant over 30 days.  We have roughly 25 properties in our entire portfolio about 1.3% that have been vacant over 30 days and we have been asking ourselves the same question we posed to you above.