GM of San Diego

Belong Co-Founders

Staff Writer, Stacker

These simple, quick and budget-friendly upgrades will help renters fall in love with your home, fast.

4 Simple but Impressive Interior Upgrades For Rental Homes

Homeowners who list their properties with Belong love their homes and want their residents to feel the exact same way. These simple, quick, and budget-friendly upgrades will help renters fall in love with your home much faster. 

Belong is the innovative property management alternative built to minimize vacancy (which is one reason that homeowners love us so much).  But sometimes renovations are necessary.  This shouldn’t be viewed as a burden, but an opportunity to smartly update the property.  Simple, elegant upgrades to the living space can pay dividends immediately, and down the line, making your home that much more attractive to potential residents — many of who are looking for certain creature comforts – and Belong knows from experience what they are.

Though a glamorous walk-in remains the gold standard, most people are keenly aware that finding one is something of a pipe dream. That being said, the many intelligently designed organization systems on the market can make a closet feel luxurious by making the greatest use of the available space.  From Ikea to Wayfair to the Container Store, there are a ton of cost-effective options these days.

Belong is a big advocates of closet systems, because they mean so much to residents. They communicate that the private spaces only they see are as important and cared-for as the living room or the bathroom or the kitchen. It makes them feel great, too, every time open the closet door and see everything so neatly arranged and displayed.

The paradox of climate change: summers are getting hotter, making everyone want to blast the AC 24/7, but you can’t help but feel guilty doing so, knowing the thing that is keeping you cool is also contributing to global warming.  Fortunately there are many new energy-efficient models that should at least mitigate the guilt; there are also new models that run quieter, so you can have a Zoom call without shouting.  We’ve also seen models that hang below the window frame, allowing the maximum amount of light to pour in through the windows.  Because what’s summer without a little summer sun?

Redoing the floors can be costly and time-consuming. There is a fashionable solution though: vinyl stickers that you can cut to measure and stick onto the floor. Of course you can do this throughout the entire apartment, but we recommend starting in the kitchens and the bathrooms. Why?  First of all, the tiles you find on the floors of many bathrooms and kitchens are so 80s; second of all, those floors tend to take a beating, so why not redo them on the cheap — especially if the results look anything but!

Adding molding and/or trims to walls/windows/cupboards can be an affordable way to instantly give an elegant, charming lift to a space. Picture rail trims invite tenants to add their own artwork to personalise a space, but even if they go unused, they have an aesthetic value in and of itself. You can also use thin, contrasting trim to open up and lighten a space - so we recommend avoiding thick or wooden trim which can look heavy and dated. 

Belong can make the upgrades and find the right tenants

Even if people aren’t actively looking for these kinds of upgrades, the fact that the homeowners care about their home — and their next residents —makes the place that much more desirable. When you've taken the time to upgrade your property, you need a committed partner who can ensure you can capture the value in your monthly rent. By partnering with Belong, we can assist with upgrades and renovations to your rental and find someone to love it, fast. 

With outdoor entertaining becoming a bigger and bigger part of our lives, the question for landlords becomes, “How can I make my backyard as comfortable as possible?” And we got your back!

5 Affordable Outdoor Hacks To Elevate Your Rental's Backyard

Even though it’s become something of a social necessity because of the pandemic, there’s always been a certain appeal to outdoor entertaining. In fact, in our opinion, there’s nothing better than sitting outside with your friends under the stars on a warm July night. 

But because Covid has made outdoor entertaining such a central part of our lives, it’s become that much more important that our backyards are comfortable and accommodating. It’s no longer enough that your rental property has some green space — now you have to have a green space that’s actually welcoming. 

When you’re self-managing your own property, there’s always this balancing act between providing the best service and accommodations without putting too big a dent in your bottom line. You might want to make your backdoor space nicer to attract the best possible residents, but you can’t shell out a small fortune on the upgrades. That’s why hacks like the ones we’ll explore in this article are so wonderful: they allow you to make significant improvements without costing a significant amount.

Because there are so many different types of gardens and outdoor spaces, we’ve categorized these hacks by what kind of space they’ll work in: we’ll start with hacks for smaller gardens, and move on to ones for bigger spaces.

The best way to encourage outdoor entertaining is to make it as easy as possible to do (call it the “If you build it, they will come” theory of home improvements).  This beautiful fold-down serving station makes it easy to fix and pour drinks without having to enter into the house; not only that, but once it’s folded out you can use the table top to set up boardgames and the like.  It can even be used as a makeshift desk; after all, the only thing better than working from home is working outdoors! 

It’s especially useful if you don’t have a lot of space, like a small urban garden. Or even a balcony!

We know we said these hacks were for elegant, English-style gardens, but this beautiful French bench would work wonders on either side of the Channel. 

This one also takes a little technical know-how, but the out-of-pocket costs are so minimal — and the aesthetic affect is so resplendent — we think it’s worth the effort.  All it takes is some wood, two identical side-chairs, and a little bit of elbow grease to create this elegant addition to any backyard.  In fact the end result is so beautiful your residents might end up moving it indoors and using it as an entryway bench!

This hack might not be as simple as some of the others, but worth the effort!

Another relatively simple hack to execute, this bird feeder isn’t only charming and quirky, but by bringing feathered friends onto your property, it’ll make the backyard feel that much more romantic and special.  Plus we love a hack that requires you drink a bottle of wine.  It combines two of our favorite past-times — Beaujolais and home improvement!

It's a great trick for staging a home – when the prospective tenants walk outside, and see the attention to detail, it will help seal the deal by making the house loveable.

An especially charming addition to the backyard of a larger, family-friendly home, a tree swing will lend the space a sense of welcoming homey-ness. The best part is that installation is relatively simple — and in case a tree swing isn’t your idea of fun, you can use a lot of the same tricks and techniques to set up a hammock instead.

An especially great hack if your outdoor area doesn’t have much space for flower beds, these easy (and cheap) straw-bale planters will lend any area an aura of rustic, rugged authenticity. They’re perfect for herb gardens, too. 

Though many of these hacks are hackable even for the clumsiest among us, when you work with Belong you have access to their professional vendor network of over 10,000 contractors, who can help you build the ones that take a bit more know-how (and maybe a power tool or two).  

Easier access to professional contractors is one of the many ways Belong is simplifying the rental experience and helping more homeowners reach their financial goals through real estate. Visit our homeowner's page to find out more about how our services are helping people to ditch property management in Seattle, Redmond, Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, Miami and many more.

With outdoor entertaining becoming a bigger and bigger part of our lives, the question for landlords becomes, “How can I make my backyard as comfortable as possible?”

Find out everything you need to know, do, and follow up on in order to successfully market your rental home and get your property loved

How to Market Your Rental Property and Find a Great Resident, Fast

With so many listing websites out there, it’s hard to know where to advertise your rental property, and how to make it stand out from the crowd. This guide will take you through the process, and give you the power to find a resident who will love your home as much as you do.

One of the questions we get asked the most at Belong is “What do I need to know, do, and follow up on in order to successfully market my rental property?”

Back in the pre-digital era, it was as simple as posting a listing in your local classifieds!  But now it seems like you need to be an expert in several different fields to check all the right boxes.  You need to be a marketing expert, one who is fully conversant in all the terminology and idiom that the natives of the real-estate industry use; you need to be a photographer and videographer who can make even the most basic spaces seem grand and inviting; and also you need to be a realtor – hyper-organized, super friendly and accommodating, up-to-date with market trends and rent prices, and willing to re-arrange your schedule on the whim of your potential clients. 

Given all that, is it any wonder that the process of finding a resident for your rental property seems so daunting?  Nor should it be a surprise that there is an entire industry devoted to helping landlords find tenants and keep them happy?  Even landlords who decide to self-manage their properties often choose to rely on brokers on the front end of the journey, to market the availability and find a resident.

If this sounds like a lot of work …That’s because it is.

It’s also the reason why so many people are working with Belong, the modern alternative to old-school, out-of-touch property managers.  Belong takes all these responsibilities off your hands, finding residents who will love your home as much as you do, while we treat your home with love and care.

Belong does so much for our homeowners that to list it all would create such a ridiculously long and unwieldy sentence that our Grammarly account would have the digital equivalent of an epileptic seizure.  We will prepare your house for the market, take photographs and videos (including 3D tours and virtual walkthroughs), list it on every relevant platform, show it to interested renters, and then prepare the contracts and help them move in. 

Curious to learn more about Belong? Click here, or see if your home qualifies for our platform, here.

If you want to be a true DIY-er, though, and handle the entire process by yourself, soup to nuts, this guide on how to market your own rental property will help you become a listing genius. 

Step 1: Understand the marketing channels

By channels, we are talking about the online platforms that list and describe properties for rent. That’s the formal way to describe them. The informal way is “Real estate porn.”

 It’s such a thing that there’s even a Saturday Night Live skit about it. So there’s no reason to be embarrassed if you too spend hours every day browsing through listing websites, looking at colonial masterpieces or brilliant new constructions.  It’s alluring.  In fact, many of us at Belong suffer from the same affliction. 

The good news is that if you spend a lot of time checking out houses for rent, you are ahead of the game when it comes to listing your own rental property.  You know the relevant sites, the kinds of photographs you need to take, the look and feel of a video walkthrough of a property.

Either way – a heavy user of real estate website or otherwise – you will find the information we’ve organized herein to be invaluable. Because the first step on the journey to successfully renting out your property is truly familiarizing yourself with the platforms and services you will use to market it.

With over 135 million listings, Zillow is the biggest real estate platform in the country.  And that’s just counting listings on Zillow.com: they also own Trulia and Hotpads, two other prominent listing sites.  So if you’re looking to rent out your home,, the first place you’ll want to list the vacancy is on Zillow. 

The nice thing about Zillow is that you are able to easily cross-list your vacancy on Trulia and Hotpads, increasing the number of eyeballs your ad will find.  

 The other nice thing about Zillow is that you can list one home for free for a month – which is perfect for people who only own a single rental property.  After 30 days it costs $9.99 a month to list on Zillow – a bargain, in our opinion, considering the platform’s reach.  Zillow also allows users to boost their listing, which gives it a more prominent placement on search results pages.

It probably goes without saying that there’s a lot of overlap between Zillow’s listings and Trulia’s: after all, as we stated above, Zillow owns Trulia.

But that being said, there are certain features that make Trulia unique relative to Zillow.  For one, it provides maps that give users information about the neighborhoods surrounding the properties they’re considering: it tells them what crime rates are in the area, where people eat and shop, what schools their children would have access to, and what your commute would be like. 

It's important for landlords to understand the way Zillow and Trulia organize the data about a listing, because it will educate you about how to position your listing; we’ll get into this subject a little later in the article, but when you’re marketing a rental property, it’s critical to remember that you’re also marketing a neighborhood.  If looking at Trulia teaches you something new about the area where you own a rental property, then browsing the site will be very much worth your time.

Much like Trulia, Apartments.com not only provides information about the individual listings on their platform, but they also have data on the neighborhoods in which those listings are located.  That includes info on shops and restaurants and the like, but Aparments.com also assigns each neighborhood walkability and bikeability scores.  They also have info on noise pollution, too. 

The main point of differentiation for landlords considering listing a home on Apartments.com is that the site is exclusively focused on rentals.  Which means that the audience it attracts is the exact audience you’re looking for. 

Apartments.com is free to use, though much like Zillow, you can pay for better placement.

Realtor.com scrapes MLS listings in order to build its robust database of homes for rent and sale.  (MLS is a service available to realtors that collates their listings in one place so people can easily find and search all the available properties.) 

Beyond its reliance on MLS data, Realtor.com also allows individual property owners to list homes for rent (but not for sale).  Much like the MLS’s from which they source most of their listings, Realtor.com is more focused on homes for sale, rather than homes for rent, but given that it’s free and popular, it’s worth your time to list your home there.

Craigslist remains popular with renters, though of course it doesn’t have the features and functionality that make the Zillows of the world so useful.  But it’s free and widely used, and so it’s worth your time. 

Beyond these mega-sites there are smaller players like HotPads, Zumper, and PadMapper – we encourage you to investigate them all, but if you’re trying to cast the widest net possible, we recommend looking at platforms like Avail that automate the process of cross-listing your home across several platforms. 

Avail also allows you to manage each listing and lead from a single portal.  In terms of getting your listing out there, it’s really a terrific option.  The best part?  Most of the key functionality is available through the free version of the service.   

Remember: it’s not only important to familiarize yourself with the pros and cons of each of these platforms; it’s also critical that you see the kind of language, images, videos, and other marketing material landlords and realtors are putting on these sites.  That way, you’ll be much better prepared to take the next step in the process of marketing your home!

The beauty of Belong is that we do all the work for you; we identify which platforms are most relevant to renters in your area, create and syndicate the ads, and pay to have them boosted if necessary.  Not only that, your home will be listed on Belong’s website – a service we only extend to homeowners on our platform. And once prospective residents start reaching out about seeing the property, we schedule and show the home for you.  So you don’t have to worry about anything except cashing the rent checks when they start coming in.

Step 2: Create great marketing collateral

Now that you’ve familiarized yourself with these platforms, it’s time to start advertising your rental. That means cleaning the home, taking photographs and videos, and writing copy for the ads themselves that makes your property feel unique and special in the marketplace. We’ll take you through the process step-by-step.

If your home is still occupied by your previous residents – which could be you! -  it might be impossible to declutter and clean, but if you’re officially between leases use the downtime to your advantage.  A clean room with bright white walls feels open to endless possibilities; it invites potential residents to imagine what it would be like to live there.  Not only that, but the combination of bright lights and a high-definition camera might make dust that much more visible in your photographs, which can make your home seem dirty. 

As is the case with the first piece of advice we offered here, it’s really a matter of showing your home in the best light.

Now that you’ve taken care of the inside of the house, it’s time to take care of the outside.  It might not be cost-feasible to give it a new coat of paint, but doing touch-up work on problem areas is a great idea, as is making sure that the driveway is devoid of weeds growing through the cracks in the asphalt, cleaning the gutters, and washing the windows.  Also it doesn’t take a huge amount of money to do a little landscaping: some flower beds and boxes under the windows can are beautiful touches that can really make a home that much more appealing.  If there are residents still living at the home, ask them to remove any childrens’ toys that might be scattered on the front lawn, and also, if possible, to park their car on the street temporarily.  First impressions matter – in dating and house hunting alike.  So make sure your home is putting its best face forward.

Find out everything you need to know, do, and follow up on in order to successfully market your rental property to get your property leased (and loved)

If you're finding it impossible to find contractors to get your property ready to hit the rental market, you need this unique property management solution.

How To Get Your Home Rent Ready When Good Contractors Can't be Found

Landlords are as anxious to rent their homes as people are to live in them. But getting those homes ready for new potential residents is getting harder and harder, as quality contractors are impossible to find. 

Where have all the home renovation contractors gone?  

They’re working on bigger, more complex jobs, that’s where they are! 

Thanks to the boom in new houses being constructed — along with an unprecedented number of renovations — we’re in the middle of a major labor shortage. There are more than 300,000 jobs in need of good, reliable craftspeople right now.

That makes finding help for smaller projects very challenging, to say the least. If you’re looking to get your home ready for the rental market, and you don’t have access to vetted professionals, this puts you in a tricky spot. You want to get your home ready to attract the ideal resident, but every day your house sits empty with no one to love it means you’re missing out on income. In this case, the cliche is true: Time is money.

You might have an impulse to put the home on the market as is, but this could also be leaving money on the table. A house that looks rundown or is not up to the standards of the neighborhood won’t bring the income it otherwise could.

Belong has an alternative to hunting for contractors

So what’s the alternative? How do you find great help, when help is so hard to find? How do you get your home fixed up ready to bring in as much income as possible, as quickly as possible?

By putting your Belong concierge on the case. Belong homeowners get instant access to over 10,000 professional contractors across our extensive vendor network. They’ve been in the industry for years and are the best in the business — experienced handy people that know how to care for a home and make it lovable.  From bathroom remodels to adding a new backsplash to a perfect fresh coat of paint, point them at a problem in your rental home and they’ll take care of it!

Belong is simplifying the rental experience and helping more homeowners reach their financial goals through real estate. Visit our homeowner's page to find out more about how our services are helping people to ditch property management in Seattle, Redmond, Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, Miami and many more.

Lucas Hanft

Lucas attended Yale University before becoming a journalist and working with brands to tell their story.

Brett Jaffe

Ashleigh Graf

Jordan Newsom

Ale, Owen & Tyler Founders

Dom Difurio

Brett Jaffe

Ashleigh Graf

Jordan Newsom

Ale, Owen & Tyler Founders

Dom Difurio