I have a different perspective as a tenant. I am 40 years old, am over educated and have a well paid job. I have been renting for nearly 20 years and have a perfect rental record. I ALWAYS pay my rent on time and am clean and tidy. There are some very bad rental agents out there. You may be frustrated about not filling your vacant property, but you may find at the other end tenants very frustrated about waiting to hear more than 2 weeks about their rental application. THIS IS NOT UNCOMMON. You might also find it easier filling your rentals if you can show the house during hours that suit them. Not during hours that most of the population are working. Before realestate.com it was much easier to find a rental property in the newspaper, where all contact was with the owner, which as a tenant I cannot explain how much I prefer this. It was rare for an owner to raise rent on a tenant once they had a good one and they always responded to requests for repairs. My rent has gone up $40/week in 2 years. If you have a good tenant make sure you keep them. I am certainly thinking about moving to get a cheaper rent from someone who is having trouble renting their property. Others in my block are $30 a week cheaper so I am being ripped off. It is now worth the trouble of moving. For my previous rental, the agents never did proper repairs – even dripping taps that were wasting litres of water an hour (during a bad drought!). Or it just never happened. I have often heard the line "the owner doesn't want to pay for that". Often I find this hard to believe. In my current rental, we had a broken toilet for nearly a year. We have INCONVENIENT "inspections" every 3 months and alway wrote this on our inspection form. You may find that agents you pay to do 3 monthly inspections send out their most junior employees. Our broken toilet was photographed 4 times by different people during inspections, and yet it took a year for the agents to do anything about it. I found the photographing particularly funny. As we had another toilet we didn't push this – but the toilet did become stained because of the fault. Which leads me to a question to you owners … after being in this place for 2 years do do you think it's fair that I'm inspected every 3 months? If you have an agent, don't assume they are doing the right thing by you. Assume they are doing the right thing by themselves, or are doing what they can be bothered doing. They will still be charging you one way or the other. What's more they will not change if you don't keep on top on them. Of course I am sure there are some good agents out there – but from a tenants perspective they are very rare. If you have a good tenant you don't have to pay your interest out of your own pocket. Rental agencies get paid for the properties they manage. Tenants fork out the cash for the both of you.