For owners sending a renewal
The hardest email you send all year.
Raise it too far and you lose a good tenant, then spend two months and a listing fee replacing them. Raise it too little and you have quietly donated the difference for another twelve. The number is only half the problem. The other half is how it reads on the other end.
Renewal offer, Unit 4F
Hi Dana,
Your lease is up at the end of January and we would like you to stay. The new rent would be $3,710 a month, starting 1 February.
I have attached the rent analysis the number came from. It lists the units nearby we compared yours to, what each of them leased for, and what each feature of your apartment is worth on top of the baseline. The parking space is in there, and so is the in-unit laundry.
If anything in it looks wrong to you, tell me which line and I will look again.
Best,
Michael
Attached: True Market Rent Analysis, 495 E. Broadway Unit 4FA number on its own reads as a decision about them.
The same number with an analysis attached reads as a decision about the market. Nothing else in the letter changes, and the entire emotional register does.
Every comparable is printed.
Addresses, rents, sizes and when each was last seen. A tenant can check them in ten minutes, and the ones who do come back persuaded rather than suspicious.
It is the same report either side would get.
The document does not change based on who ran it, and the appendix prints every answer that went in. That is precisely what makes it worth attaching: you are not asking to be trusted.
The cost of being wrong is not the rent.
It is the vacant weeks, the make-ready, the listing, the showings and the new tenant you do not know yet. A renewal that holds is usually worth far more than the few dollars a month that broke it.
A renewal that holds, or a vacancy you chose.
Either the tenant signs, or you raised the rent knowing exactly what you were risking and decided it was worth it. Both are better than guessing.
You stop dreading the reply.
Most owners are not trying to squeeze anyone. They just have no way to show that, so the letter arrives sounding like something it is not.
Run the unit before you write the letter.
It costs nothing, and the document is yours to attach or ignore.