Perhaps you’ve been considering dipping your feet into the lucrative property investment pool here in the Northern Virginia area. While not every investor ends up renting property to military personnel, many of them do in the Northern Virginia rental market due to the concentration of military employment in our area.
Understanding the unique elements of renting to military personnel—including their habits when it comes to rental properties—can help you find great success as a property owner. However, you’ll also want to lean on an excellent Northern Virginia property management company like RentSimple for even more localized expertise.
Frequent Renter Turnover: A Fact of Local Life
Local property investors begin their calculations for their enterprises’ profitability with a clear understanding that frequent turnover is just part of the business in this area. You can use the same principles of great customer service to delight your renters, but there is a good chance that they will only stay for two or three years as part of their rotation.
Remember, however, that military personnel are highly networked, and a positive experience at your property could potentially result in a referral for a friend or colleague down the road. Even a resident who deploys suddenly and needs to vacate your property before their lease is up can sometimes point you in a new resident’s direction.
However, understanding the flow of vacancies in our area—and quickly finding excellent new renters—is one element of why working with Northern Virginia property management supports your lasting returns. Investing confidently starts here.
The Need for Flexible Lease Terms and Conditions
If you haven’t rented properties in an area with a lot of military personnel before, you may be unfamiliar with the regulations in Virginia that allow for breaking a lease or changing the lease’s conditions in the case of deployment. There are still rules to be followed by the renter, who needs to give you an appropriate amount of notice as required by the law, but you may have to end a lease agreement without any penalties due to deployment.
This service is simply one way to respect the difficult and occasionally unpredictable lives of military personnel, and it usually doesn’t result in a major loss of income for property investors. Generally, they want to keep you in the loop as well so that you can re-rent the property with very little vacancy downtime. Investing in property in a military-heavy area requires getting to know these procedures so that you can accommodate those who serve our country.
Alternatively, if you prefer to be a hands-off investor, you can find a Northern Virginia property management partner well-versed in these procedures to handle the entire process from start to finish.
New Renters Are Still Easy to Find
Despite turnover and occasional abrupt lease changes, you may find it easier than in other places to find a pool of excellent rental applicants for your property.
Your Northern Virginia property manager will have insight into how to best advertise your property to quickly find high-quality applicants since the temporary assignments of the military create an ample market for high-quality housing. Make it your business to know the best places to advertise your property, and remember that RentSimple is here to help!
Our Nation’s Heroes Are High-Quality Residents
One of the most satisfying aspects of renting to military personnel is realizing that they make significant sacrifices for our country—and you get to be the one to provide them with an oasis of calm at home. Creating and maintaining an excellent rental property gains even more meaning and value when you know that it will also be giving back to the military community that serves us all.
You also may find some benefit in the fact that military personnel have quite rigorous training in respecting space and resources, which translates to respect for your great spaces as well. While there are, of course, a range of military personnel, in general, they tend to be respectful of properties (like their homes) and are excellent at communication. If something is wrong, they’ll be sure to let you know rather than covering up the issue.
These are the kinds of high-quality renters that just about every investor would be proud to serve.
Northern Virginia Property Management With Experience Can Help!
With a property management team, you are getting much more than an understanding of military personnel and their rental property behavior. You get access to locals who are paying attention to small shifts in the housing market, helping you keep your rental rates affordable while also making you a strong return on your investment.
You’re also getting access to a network of property maintenance and repair vendors with whom RentSimple has created long-term relationships. Working with a property manager helps you manage your rental properties no matter where in the world you are, and choosing Northern Virginia means getting access to our area’s high-quality residents that will help you continue to offer great spaces to great people to create lasting returns.
