Making your tenant feel special and like their best interests are your own goes a long way to increasing lease renewals.

These simple tricks will help root your tenant in their community, ensure your tenants feel appreciated, and encourage your tenants to renew.

1. Be Professional and Friendly

Knowing how to build a positive relationship with tenants is key to making your tenants feel appreciated. A professional yet friendly demeanor informed by empathy will let your tenant know that you're on the same side. Everything else flows from there.

2. Give Them a Welcome Letter and a Gift Basket

When your new tenants move in, make them feel welcome with a letter of appreciation and a small gift basket on the kitchen counter.

Then, when your tenants renew their lease, send them a thank you note and another little gift basket. They’ll appreciate the effort, and this small token will make them feel at home.

3. Provide a Gift Certificate to Your Neighborhood Hardware or Home Goods Store

Help your tenants turn your investment into their home with a small gift. How much you give depends on your budget, but it doesn’t have to be a lot to make your tenants feel at home.

4. Have a Tenant Appreciation Event

While simple, a cookout for tenants and their families can go a long way to making your residents feel like you went above and beyond the extra mile.

This will go a long way to cultivating a positive relationship with your tenant, which is an essential facet of avoiding vacancies in your rental property. Although more feasible for someone who owns a multi-unit property, building a community is highly beneficial.

5. Track Tenant Birthdays and Significant Anniversaries, and Send Them a Card or Small Gift

Another example of going above and beyond the extra mile, giving your tenants a gift card for dinner at a neighborhood eatery will make them feel very special. It’ll also further tie your tenant to the local community.

Just find out when their birthday and anniversary are and put it in a calendar to not forget.

6. Give a Gift Certificate to a Neighborhood Supermarket Before a Major Holiday

Another opportunity to make your tenant feel special and more connected to their local community is a gift certificate to your local supermarket. Thanksgiving and the 4th of July are two great opportunities.

7. Celebrate a Streak of On-Time Rent Payments with a Small Rent Cut or Gift

If your tenants get a small reward for paying their rent on time, it’ll make them feel special, encourage them to keep up the good work, and could further contribute to them renewing their lease. Online rental payments help property owners and tenants and are one of the tips and tricks to get your renters to renew their lease.

Even though online rent payments make it so much easier to make rent payments on time that a reward may seem unnecessary, the gesture can still go a long way toward getting your tenant to renew their lease.

If you’re not using online rental payments, start doing so. It spares everyone the headache of checks getting lost in or delayed by the mail and makes on-time payments easier thanks to auto-bill options.

8. Upgrade an Old Appliance

It’s often in between tenants that you install an item like a new fridge or washing machine, but you can also do it while your current tenant is still living there. If you were planning on buying something new anyway, why not use it as an opportunity to encourage your tenant to renew their lease?

9. Make Repairs ASAP

Fixing things fast not only saves you money but also makes your tenant feel like their requests matter. Long waits for repairs and maintenance and delayed responses from landlords are a big demerit from a tenant’s perspective.

Always budget 5% of your investment’s value for repairs per year, at a minimum, so money’s never an issue.

10. Respect Tenant Privacy

One of the things required of property managers by law is respecting a tenant’s right to privacy.

This means that property managers can only enter if they give proper notice within 24 to 48 hours:

• there's an emergency
• need to make repairs
• need to show the space near the end of the lease
• there's good reason to think the tenant hasn't been there for an extended period, usually seven days at minimum based on local and state laws

Despite how clearly these stipulations are outlined, it’s not unheard of for a landlord to violate these criteria, which is one of the fastest ways to discourage lease renewals.

11. Ask Tenants for Input

Asking your tenants for input about renovations is a great way to make them feel heard and valued, as is listening to their renovation suggestions.

12. Provide Unit Cleanings for Long-Term Residents

Having a trusted cleaning crew at your disposal that works more autonomy is one of the tips for easy rental tenant turnover management, but why wait until a turnover for a deep clean?

When you've lucked into a long-term, high-quality tenant, their unit will end up with the sort of stains and muck that only comes with long-term occupancy. Having a professional deep cleaning can save you money in the long term and serve as another avenue for making your tenant feel valued.

13. Make Rent Increases with Consideration

If you’re following these other steps, you already know which dates are important to your tenants. Don’t make holidays the time of year when you raise the rent. That way, you don’t risk spoiling what might otherwise be a special occasion for your tenants and leaving a bad taste in their mouths. If you can, raise the rent in increments rather than all at once. And make sure the reason for the increase is made clear to tenants.

Bottom Line on Showing Tenant Appreciation

It takes a small investment to make a tenant feel valued, but it’ll pay you back tenfold. And if you’re performing already scheduled upgrades, cleanings, and maintenance while you already have a tenant, then it takes no investment at all.

With less to worry about, you’ll be able to enjoy a truly passive income.