When listing your condo for rent, one key decision you’ll have to make will be how much you want to charge. You’ll have to ride a fine line between maximizing your profit and pricing yourself out of the market. Here are a few tips that may help you think through your options:

Start close to home

Thankfully, unlike setting rent for a single family home, setting rent in a condo building means that there is likely a number of other, similar units that are rented out. You can do your research by speaking to the other owners, or just checking out online listings. Looking at other rents in your own building is the single best method for setting your own, condos in the same building are always more similar than they are different.

Then, branch out

How’s the neighborhood? Is it up-and-coming? What’s the average salary of residents? Information on all these things is available online. You can look through listings for your neighborhood to find an average of what condos with your number of bedrooms and other amenities are listed for.

Take advantage of online resources

There are also sites with “Rent Calculators” that allow you to put in a variety of details and then generate a recommendation. Of course, because technology can often be flawed, these results should only be used in conjunction with other resources. Real estate websites like Redfin and Zillow also have rent estimators, so if you look up the addresses of certain units, even other ones in your building, you should be able to see one idea of what rents on them should be.

Use the 1% rule

When you’re trying to get a rough idea of what your rents should be, one general rule of thumb for rentals is that rent should be roughly 1% of the gross value of the property. So, if you bought your condo for $250,000, a starting point for your rent would be $2,500/month. Then, you’d use all the other supplementary information above to go up or down from there.

Setting the right rent for your property, and finding good tenants who are willing to pay it, is a skill that comes from years of experience. With more than 200 buildings managed since 2003, we at Hales Property Management know what makes buildings work.