Hey, what’s up everyone. Chris Kennedy here with Mayfair Real Estate and Mayfair Property Management in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. And I want to make a couple of videos, I guess, a series of videos about things that you can do to your multi-family apartment buildings that will help you to increase your top line revenue. So it’s one of the things that as property management, we get asked quite frequently from investors, they say, “Okay, what are some things that I can do here to increase rent as soon as possible or some cost-effective ways to do that?” So I decided to make a couple of videos on it. So this first video I’m going to cover things you can do to the exterior of the property and things that would affect all residents at a property, basically some amenities that you might consider, and I’m trying to keep it to simple things that are cost effective.
So just to set the tone for this, remember that there are basically three ways that you can increase your top line revenue. The first and most obvious is increasing the rents that people pay. The second thing is increasing retention. In other words, reducing your vacancy, making sure that people stay at the property and renew their leases. And then the third thing is reducing the time on the market of actual vacant units. In other words, improving your leasing efficiency. So the improvements that we’re going to talk about in this video and on the next one are going to be things that affect one or more of those three ways to increase your revenues. Okay. So first one, super simple, very cheap in general on a relative scale, first thing you can do at an apartment building to improve the curb appeal would be to go ahead and clean up the landscaping.
So what happens is a lot of people that either have owned a property for a while, or you take over a new property that you’ve just purchased and the previous owner had owned it for a while and the landscaping tends to get a little bit tired, it gets a little bit out of control. So getting a good experienced landscaping crew in there to really clean up the property can go a long way to making it look a whole lot better. Just basic stuff like trimming branches back from the roof, cleaning up old shrubs, weeds that have overgrown, cutting the grass and getting rid of any dead tree stumps, anything like that, pulling vines off the building that might not be very good for the building and just overall cleaning up the landscaping that will go a long way to making the curb appeal much nicer. That’s item number one. Number two, also along the lines of curb appeal, go ahead and paint the building.
If the building does not have good fresh looking paint, painting a building is a great way for you to let the residents know and that your future residents know that you care for the property. And it gives a higher perceived value to the property and therefore it will increase your rent. It will also reduce the time on market when you’re leasing. People want to show up and see a nice property and they’re more likely to put in a rental application. The third thing you can do on the exterior of a property is kind of along the same lines, but with the parking lot. A lot of times people will go in and they’ll make a property look a lot nicer with the paint job, the landscaping, put some money into it there and then they forget about the parking spots.
And this is something that’s super easy to do. Go ahead and reseal, recoat the parking lot, put some fresh stripes down, paint those parking bumpers and the curbs, get it all looking nice and fresh. And that will just give an extra pop to the property when someone drives in the first impression they get is they pull into the parking lot, make it look good and you’ll again, reduce the time on market for vacant units and you’ll probably bump the rent a little bit just because the property looks well taken care of and it’s a place that people want to live. When people see that management cares about the property and their residents, they are going to pay more rent and stay longer. And then the last thing that I’ll say is also fairly cost efficient, a little more expensive than the other items that I mentioned, or may require a little more work and permitting and all of that stuff.
But if you buy a property or you have a property that does not have any sort of laundry facilities, finding a way to put in laundry facilities is a really, really good value add. People will absolutely pay more rent and stay longer at a property that has on-site laundry of some kind. By far the best is in-unit laundry. We’ll talk about that in the next video, but if you can’t pull that off, then find either an empty storage room or some part of the building where you can install a common washer and dryer coin operated or multiple machines. So you can either make them coin operated or we have in the past actually converted storage rooms into washer dryer facilities, laundry rooms for the residents and provided secure access for those residents. And we actually offer that as a complimentary service for the residents.
So in buildings where you can’t put washer dryers in the units, maybe some of the older properties where units are smaller then giving residents a free on-site laundry is a great way to lease units quickly and get top of market rent for those units. You’re probably going to do better doing that than getting the extra 1.50- $2 per wash that you would get from coin operated washers and dryers. Okay. Just a few ideas there. Hope this was helpful. If you liked this video, if you like what we’re generally putting out there, then go ahead and subscribe to our channel and give us a thumbs up. Thanks so much for checking it out. Stay tuned for the next one where I’ll talk about things that you can do on the interior of the property in units, specifically inside individual units to bump up that revenue in your apartment buildings. Thanks so much. See you in the next one.