Loading blog content, please wait...
The Franklin Rental You Priced by Last Summer's Rent You set the rent last year, a tenant signed, and it worked. So when the lease comes up for renewal ...
You set the rent last year, a tenant signed, and it worked. So when the lease comes up for renewal this summer, or the unit turns over, the instinct is to reach for that same number. Maybe bump it a little. It's a reasonable place to start. The problem is that a rent figure has a shelf life, and last summer's number is telling you what one property did with one tenant twelve months ago, not what your unit is worth to the next person walking through the door in 2026.
That gap is where money quietly goes missing in both directions. Price too high off an outdated assumption and the unit sits empty while you carry the mortgage. Price too low because you're anchored to an old number and you've locked in below-market rent for a full lease term. Neither is a disaster. Both are avoidable.
Here's the thing people forget about the rent they set last year: it was never a fixed property of the building. It was a negotiated outcome between what you asked and what one tenant was willing to pay on one particular week. The Franklin rental market moves. Not wildly, and not on some dramatic timeline, but it moves. New inventory comes online near Berry Farms and out toward the developments along Goose Creek Bypass. Demand shifts with hiring at the corporate campuses off Carothers and Mallory Lane. School zones get more or less competitive. All of that reshapes what a renter will actually pay, and none of it shows up in the number you wrote down last July.
So when you renew or re-list at last summer's rent, you're not being conservative. You're guessing, using data that's a year stale. Sometimes the guess is close. Sometimes it's off by more than you'd expect for a market this size.
The honest answer is comparable units, leased recently, near yours. Not listed. Leased. A neighbor's rental sitting on the market at an aspirational price tells you almost nothing, because nobody has agreed to pay it. What matters is what units of your size, condition, and location actually rented for in the last sixty to ninety days.
That's a smaller and messier dataset than the big listing sites make it look. A three-bedroom near Westhaven with a two-car garage and updated finishes doesn't compare cleanly to a three-bedroom off Columbia Avenue that's charming but original throughout. Square footage matches, rent doesn't. Condition, layout, yard, parking, and how the unit shows on a walkthrough all move the number. When we price a Franklin rental, we're pulling recent signed leases, adjusting for those differences honestly, and landing on a range rather than pretending there's one perfect figure.
Seasonality plays in too. Summer is genuinely the busiest leasing stretch in Franklin, with families timing moves around the school calendar and Williamson County's schools staying a real draw. A unit that would take weeks to lease in January often moves quickly in June or July. If you're setting rent right now, that seasonal tailwind is part of the math, and it won't be there in the same way come fall.
Say last summer's rent was set slightly under market to fill the unit fast, which is common and often smart. Renew at that same number this year and you've now carried a below-market rent through a second full lease term. That compounds. On the other side, if the market has softened for your specific unit type and you re-list at last year's optimistic number, every week vacant erases the premium you were hoping to protect. A month empty usually costs more than the small monthly bump you were trying to hold onto.
The point isn't to chase the highest possible rent. It's to price to the current market on purpose, with eyes open, rather than defaulting to a figure that made sense a year ago. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's guidance on rental costs and budgeting is a useful reminder of how tenants actually evaluate what they can afford, which is exactly the demand side that sets your ceiling.
When Redbird manages a Franklin property, repricing isn't a once-a-year reflex tied to the lease date. We're watching what's leasing across the neighborhoods we work in, so when your renewal comes up, the recommendation is built on this year's activity, not a copy of last year's lease. Sometimes that means a modest increase. Sometimes it means holding steady to keep a good tenant in place, because a reliable renter who pays on time and treats the property well has real value that doesn't show up on a rent comp. And occasionally it means recognizing the old number was leaving money on the table and adjusting up with a clear case for why.
That last part matters. A rent increase you can explain, backed by recent comparable leases, is one a good tenant tends to accept. An increase that's just "prices went up" invites pushback and turnover. Turnover is where the real expense lives: the vacant weeks, the make-ready work, the marketing, the showing. Repricing intelligently is partly about the rent itself and largely about avoiding an unnecessary turn.
For out-of-state investors especially, this is the piece that's hard to do from a distance. You can't feel the Franklin market from a spreadsheet in another state, and last year's rent is the one number you have easy access to, so it becomes the anchor by default. Having someone local pulling current data and telling you honestly whether your number still holds is most of what good property management actually is.
Pull up the rent you set last summer and treat it as a starting question, not an answer. Ask what units like yours have actually leased for in your Franklin neighborhood in the last few months. Ask whether summer demand is working for or against your timing. Ask whether keeping a good tenant slightly under market beats a bigger number and a possible vacancy. Those answers change year to year, and the goal is simply to make this year's decision on this year's information. If you'd rather not chase all that down yourself, that's exactly the call we're glad to take.