Raising rent. As a landlord, you know you need to do it in order to actually cover your rising expenses and maybe even to make a cash flow for once.

But you have great tenants and you'd feel guilty raising their rent and you might even make them unhappy and want to leave.

So should you just keep your rent the same for years?

Or what if I told you there was a way you could raise your rent and keep your good tenants happy?

In this episode, I'm talking to a landlord who has just such an approach and we're getting

started right now.

Welcome to the podcast Real Estate Investing with Coach Carson.

I'm your host, Chad Carson.

You can also call me Coach Carson, and this is a show to help you get out of the financial grind

so you can spend your time doing more of what matters.

In this episode, I interviewed Dion from the YouTube channel Dion Talks Financial Freedom.

It was actually recorded on site at the one rental at a time event in Las Vegas

hosted by my friend and fellow real estate YouTuber Michael Zuber. I want to thank Michael for

allowing me to use his awesome recording studio and for allowing me to share it with you.

Now let's get to our conversation. Dion, there's a lot of topics I wanted to talk to you about,

but there's one in particular I get a lot of questions about is over the last few years rents have been rising, market rents are going up. I own an existing rental property. I have some good tenants. I don't want to lose these tenants. But I also want to take advantage of the fact that rents are actually higher in the market. So my question to you is, what's an approach that we could use that you, I know you've tried some

cool stuff. What's an approach that you would recommend for somebody to actually be able to raise

their rents and do it in a fair way in a way that we all kind of get along and we keep our good

tenants? So I get asked a lot of times by people who say, I want to raise the rent, but I don't

lose a good tenant. And the idea is if you don't raise the rent, you're going to lose a good asset. So even Graham Stephan made the mistake. He had 10 rentals in California. He had 10 years with no rent increases. And eventually he realized he was getting a better return by cash sitting in a drawer than money sitting in his rental. So he sold some instead of raising the rents. And I think that there's a lot of times where tenants live in a property and a lot of fear that the new owner is going to come in buy the property and raise the rents or kick them out and raise the rents. So they're actually living in fear. So what I've come up with is called the binder strategy. And this is a strategy that got me invited on bigger pockets. I made a free course on it. on it. The idea is happy tenants don't leave and happy tenants don't trash your properties. So I call it the binder because I actually make a three ring binder. And most tenants, like I said, are living in fear of somebody buying the property. They haven't been paying attention to home prices or rents. They've been renting in a place for a while. Generally, what I do is I buy a property where the landlord was tired. The tenants haven't been taken care of. They haven't raised rents in a few years. They're not making money. That's probably why they're selling it. It's a lot easier to find cash flowing properties on the MLS if your tenants ask you to raise the rent. And so every time I bring this up, people say, well, tenants would never ask for that.

They won't unless you educate them. So what I want to do is actually educate the tenant and have them be a part of the conversation. How many tenants have ever got to be a part of the conversation of setting their rents, being treated actually like a human? So instead of coming into a tenant and saying, I'm going to raise your rents $100, which would make me a jerk. I'm going to have a conversation. And I use some exact numbers from

ones that I've done. I buy a property, rents are eight or 900. It was a duplex eight and 900. So eight or. And after the binder strategy, both rents were above $1,400. So if I raised it $100, I'm a jerk. But I had rents above $1, 1400 after the 10 minute conversation and the tenants are happy.

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