How to Use Psychology to Attract Potential Tenants

There are a variety of factors that influence whether or not rental postings appeal to potential tenants. It’s more about knowing your target market and taking into account their needs and wants. Aside from recognizing market trends, being up to speed with subconscious psychological trends can also affect the status of your rental property.

You will undoubtedly attract suitable tenants and be able to fill your vacant rentals more quickly if you understand these characteristics and use them to present your rental property in the best light. If you’re having trouble attracting people to look at your rentals, consider these six (6) psychological characteristics that can influence your ideal tenants.

Show the Ideal Lifestyle

Homebuyers nowadays are not only looking for a roof over their heads. They are looking for a certain lifestyle. This is what makes marketers and sales agents do lifestyle selling whether they are offering a product or a service. Lifestyle selling is all about showing your target market the ideal life that they would have if they decide to purchase a certain product. In the case of real estate, the product is the property or the rental.

When planning to rent out a unit, you first need to know your audience. Second, be sure of what lifestyle you want to sell. For example, if you are targeting young professionals or young couples, determine the lifestyle that they want to have. Showcase it through staging your property, or marketing it on social media channels.

First Impressions Matter

Knowing your audience is one thing but getting them to be impressed on first viewing is another thing. Their minds can completely change depending on their first impression of the rental unit. This is why first impressions matter and are considered very critical. When the potential tenants visit to view the house, make sure that the main entrance is free of clutter or any form of hazard. Make your foyer clean and presentable. Stage or furnish the main areas of the house like the living area, dining area, and bedrooms. Read more about how you can engage their five senses when home viewing right here.

Use Emotion

People always listen to their gut feelings. When they don’t feel good in a certain home, they will eventually lose their interest no matter how presentable the home is. The key to avoiding that is to tell a story whether visual or verbal. Renters are likely to rent a home because they liked it and when they liked it, it means that they feel a sense of emotional attachment to the home. Tricks like helping them visualize the view when they have breakfast in the morning, how the family can gather in the living area, or showing them the stunning view of the balcony in the bedroom can trigger emotional responses. Staging and decorating the rooms will help them envision themselves living in the house and creating memories.

Cultural Superstitions

Whether your prospective tenants believe in superstitions or not, you still should consider this when presenting your rental unit to your target market. Why? Because the majority of them would still rather select a home with good luck since they’ve got nothing to lose whether or not they strongly believe in cultural superstitions. The most common superstition to consider is Feng Shui. It is a way of arranging furniture pieces within a home and adding certain décor elements to attract the flow of positive energy.

Another thing is Numerology. In Chinese culture, for example, 8 is considered the luckiest number. Choosing a 6, 8, or 9 as the last digit of a rental’s listed price can be a good tactic.

Use Color Psychology

Color psychology is an important factor that contributes to rental sales. When you are planning to rent out your unit, the best course of action to take is to apply a fresh coat of paint. When it comes to selecting colors, pick something that would typically appeal to a wide range of tenants.

However, no matter how much you want to create a sense of energy and warmth into your unit, don’t ever paint it with vibrant colors such as orange, yellow, or red as these can be a turn-off to renters. Use muted neutral hues instead such as cream, beige, pastels, or tan. This can create an impression that your house is bright and spacious.

Understand Pricing Psychology

Getting the price right is probably the single most important consideration for many when it comes to buying, selling, or renting property. We’re all familiar with charm pricing or the perceived thought that a $1.99 sounds less than $2. While prices that end with nines are so common, it is seldom effective in real estate.

Buying or renting property is a unique case since it is a high-end purchase. Buyers spend more money when prices are set. Because high degrees of precision are generally only noticed in tiny numbers, the brain is misled into thinking that $562,898.12 is more wallet-friendly than $550,000, despite its length and complexity, the authors suggested that this was because customers were “primed with low magnitudes.”

However, keep in mind that real estate pricing is more about understanding how a potential buyer or renter will perceive that value than it is about the actual value that you assign to a property.

Simply putting your property on the market right away won’t do.

There’s a lot of factors that are involved and need to be considered when renting or selling a property. Even so, real estate selling is not a mind game. It’s all about creating a win-win situation by presenting a product in front of your audience and doing things to help them solve their problems and land the best real estate deal.