How To Raise Rents Without Loosing Tenants

Yes, you can increase cash-flow, while keeping vacancy low

Oct 03, 2025

Welcome to this week’s issue The Un-Normal Investor. Each week, I publish one 5-minute read that’s written to make you a smarter real estate investor.
If you don’t know where to start, or you’ve hit a roadblock along your journey, consider joining our private community.
You’ll have instant access to our chat where we answer each other’s questions and share referrals, live Q&As with special guests, and invite-only in-person events and dinners.

Join the community

Long-term buy and hold investors often forget that the #1 killer of cashflow - aside from taxes - is vacancy.

The common approach that most use to grow their top line is to wait for a tenant to vacate, and re-fill the unit at a higher rate. But an even better approach, is to push rents without ever letting the unit go empty.

Most think that this is impossible to pull off, but it’s not.

Here’s how I do it across my portfolio:

Step 1: I Open Up the Lines of Communication

Nobody likes the hassle of having to move.

I’ve found that before a tenant reaches their breaking point, they’ll tell us what’s making them consider relocating. But the key is to give them a way to communicate their concerns. So I provide plenty of different ways that our tenants can get in touch with us - email, phone call, and even text.

I self-manage a handful of units but leverage 3rd-party management for the bulk of my portfolio. For those units that I personally oversee, residents can send an email or text any time of day, and they’ll receive a response from either myself or my virtual assistant within 24 - 72 hours. My property managers can be reached via phone call and text in addition to email. They make an effort to provide same day response.

Step 2: Take a Top-Down Approach to Tackling Issues

Once I’ve gathered all of the pain points from our residents, I focus on the most important ones first; especially those that are an easy fix.

Don’t overwhelm yourself or your management team by trying to resolve every problem at once. Start at the top of the list and gradually work your way down. Remember, tenants aren’t expecting ‘perfection’; they just want to see ‘improvement’.

It’s extremely rare that a tenant will make a grievance pertaining to their ‘rent being too high’.

The vast majority of complaints are pertaining to a broken appliance, stolen package, or noisy neighbor. All of which are relatively simple and inexpensive problems to solve. I hone in on these low hanging fruits first, and work my way around to the more complex and costly issues.

Step 3: Identify the Outliers

Within every portfolio - especially if you’ve inherited tenants from a previous owner - there are a handful of ‘outliers’.

These are the tenants whose rents are severely suppressed compared to the present day market rates.

Rather than attempting to raise rents across my entire portfolio - risking a spike in vacancy - I target those outliers and work on bringing their rents to fair market value first.

Then once I’ve made it through that cohort, I turn my attention to the remainder of the residents who are ripe for a rent increase.

Step 4: Put Up Guardrails

Rent rate imbalance (the disparity between the in-place rent and market-rate rent) is often the result of a lapse in financial oversight.

As my portfolio grew, I recognized that it would be more difficult to remain acutely in-tuned to the financial well-being of each and every property that I owned. With this in mind, I removed as many manual cogs from the machine as I possibly could. I automated everything that didn’t require critical decision making, and systematized the rest.

With SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) in place, I drastically reduced the risk of any leases falling between the cracks and going years without an eval (evaluation) or reassessment.

It’s important to take a measured approach to raising rents.

If you attempt to squeeze out more money from your tenants without re-investing in the real estate, you’ll be left with an empty building.

Additionally, it’s wise to raise rents in an orderly fashion. Bring up the bottom of the bunch before proceeding to the newer residents that have only been with you for a year or two.

If you borrow from these tips, and add your own twist, you’ll be able to do what most investors can’t - add to your top line while protecting your bottom line from vacancy risk.

What’s your take on today’s topic? Do you agree, disagree, or is there something I missed?