What can you actually rent your house for?

Why automated rent estimates miss

Every listing site offers an instant rent estimate, and they are useful as a starting point. They are built from public records — bedroom count, bathroom count, square footage, lot size, sale history — and a model trained on the surrounding area.

What that model cannot see is most of what decides your rent:

• Condition and finish level. Two identical floor plans on the same street can be several hundred dollars apart on rent because one has an updated kitchen and the other has the original one.
• What a tenant actually experiences. Natural light, layout, noise from an arterial road, whether the yard is usable, whether parking is genuinely convenient.
• Which comparables are real. Automated tools frequently include properties that were listed and never leased. A property that sat for two months at $2,400 is evidence of what the market will not pay.
• Timing. The same house lists for meaningfully different rent in June than in November.
• Local rules. Licensing, inspection requirements and occupancy limits all affect what you can lawfully do with the property, and therefore what it is worth.

How we work out the number

1. Leased comparables, not listed ones. We start from properties that actually signed a lease in the last few months, as close to your property as the data allows.
2. Adjust for the real differences — square footage, bed and bath count, garage, finished basement, yard, condition and finish level.
3. Check days on market for each comparable. A house that leased in five days was underpriced; one that took seven weeks was overpriced. That spread is where the right number sits.
4. Apply the seasonal adjustment for when you would actually be listing.
5. Sanity-check against current supply — what a tenant searching today would see alongside your property.

Then we tell you the range and where in it we would price, and why.

The cost of getting it wrong

This is worth being concrete about, because owners consistently underestimate one side of it.

Priced too high, the property sits. On a $2,200 rental, three extra weeks of vacancy is about $1,500 — and you generally end up leasing near the correct number anyway, having paid for the experiment. Worse, a listing that goes stale attracts lower-quality inquiries.

Priced too low, you lease quickly and feel good about it, then carry the shortfall for the entire tenancy. $100 a month under market across a two-year tenancy is $2,400, and Colorado limits you to one increase in any 12-month period, so correcting it takes time.

Both errors cost roughly the same. Only one of them feels like a mistake at the time.

What we will ask you about

The address gets us most of the way. These details tighten the range:

• Bedrooms, bathrooms and approximate square footage
• Garage, and whether the basement is finished
• Anything updated recently — kitchen, bathrooms, flooring, HVAC, roof
• Whether it would be furnished or unfurnished
• Your position on pets, which affects both rent and how quickly it leases
• When it would be available
• Whether there is an HOA, since some restrict rentals outright

Where we work

North metro: Westminster, Arvada, Thornton, Northglenn, Federal Heights, Broomfield, Commerce City, Brighton.

Boulder County: Boulder, Longmont, Louisville, Superior, Lafayette, Erie, Firestone, Frederick.

West and central: Wheat Ridge, Golden, Lakewood, Denver.

If you would rather work it out yourself

That is a legitimate choice and we have written the method down rather than keeping it back. Our guide to pricing a rental walks through the same process we use. If you are still deciding whether to rent the property at all, should I sell or rent my house covers the tax question that has a deadline attached — worth reading before you commit either way.