I want to present several resources where a real estate investor or property owner can determine what rent they can charge for their investment property. The three most popular websites available for this purpose are Zillow.com, Rentometer.com and Craig’s List.

Zillow is the most popular and respected, so we’ll start there. Gonna zillow.com and enter the address of your property and then click “search”. Click on the word “Rent” or “Zestimate”, both of which will give you rent estimates. The word Zestimate (Zillow Rent Estimate) should appear with the amount of the rent and the range that Zillow believes the property can rent for.

We know Zillow isn’t perfect. Zillow uses computer modeling and they are basing your Zestimate rent on averages in the area that have similar characteristics to your property, ie square footage, similar number of beds, bathrooms, etc. Again, no computer model is ever going to be perfect, but Zillow is generally accurate. You will need to be realistic about the property and look at its features. If your home is a multi-unit building or if your home is different from any other property in the neighborhood, the Zestimate may not be accurate.

The second site is rentometer.com. Once on the site, enter the address of the property. On this site they ask how many bedrooms are in the property. You can also provide other information that could make the rent estimate more accurate. Once you have entered all the information, click “submit”. The site will give you an analysis similar to Zillow’s and a range in which they think the rent may fall.

Another good way to get a comparable rent is Craig’s List. Craig’s List has had problems in the past involving scammers and fraud. But as far as determining rental amounts, it’s pretty accurate. On this site, you would perform a slightly different search. You would go to Craig’s List for your area and go to the “Apt/Houses” section and type in your city. Or, if it is a development, you can type the name of the development. Next, enter the number of bedrooms and/or bathrooms. At that time, many houses or apartments will appear in your rental search. You then need to go through them and see if any of them are similar and look like your apples-to-apples property.

Keep in mind that these are estimates and you will need to test the market to really know how much your property can rent per month. We do not recommend that you try to “go high” and think you can trade lower. This rarely works in today’s environment. In general, if you overprice your property in the hope of getting more rent, it will simply be ignored and you will get no traffic or potential tenants.

The best strategy is to use the above resources to get a rough estimate of your property’s rent, and then price your property a little lower. This should attract many more fees and can result in a quick move instead of being overpriced and the property sitting vacant for weeks or months.