Are you concerned about allowing pets in your property? Well, you aren’t alone. The challenge however is to step back from personal feelings, personal experiences, or horror stories on your Facebook feed, to really hear the truth about the choice of not accepts pets and how it might impact your bottom line.
Recent studies have shown that while the percentage of pet-owning-renters use to be below 50%, it’s now around 75%. In some markets (such as Colorado Springs), which are well known for being extremely pet friend, it is even higher. From our experience over the many years of managing rental properties in this market, the percentage of pet-owning-renters is likely closer to about 80%.
Let’s take a small scale example to review how saying no to pets could impact you as a landlord. We will start by pretending that we are in a market with 100 identical homes available in the same sub-area, and 100 renters looking to move. You are saying no to pets, so instead of having 100 potential renters, you have 20. Well, those 20 pet free tenants aren’t only looking for properties that don’t accept pets, they are looking for any property that will let them move-in. So, what happens when those 20 move into 20 of the other 99 homes which accept pets? Now you are left with 0 potential renters, and you have to wait for more renters to start shopping for another chance. I’m sure you can see how this might drastically and negatively affect the return of your investment, it increases the risk of a much longer vacancy.
With that said, pets can and do cause damage. However from our experience and on average, home owners who say no to pets lose more money in lost rents, than those that do allow pets see in pet caused damage.
So, by saying no to pets, you are really just paying to avoid additional gray hairs. But that’s why you hire a professional property manager right? So we can lose all of our hair while you relax on a beach in Tahiti sipping a margarita! :)
Just our two cents.