All good advice so far. I currently work as a property manager and also have had the experience of owning a condo and renting it out when I moved out of the country, so let me add the following…
See if there are agencies in your area who will do all the screening, credit checks and showing for you. That’s what I did when I decided to rent my condo and didn’t have the time or resources to do it all myself. And it was worth every penny of the fee, which was equal to whatever one month’s rent to my tenants would be. You still have complete control over who you rent to, but they do all the leg work so you don’t have to bother with anything but interviewing prospective tenants and reviewing the background checks provided by the agency.
They have a ready database of people who are looking for homes to rent, so the process will be more likely to go quickly. And if they don’t have anyone who matches your criteria right now, they pay to run the ads for you. They run the credit checks, verify employment, call previous landlords, etc. They come to your house in the middle of the work day to show it so you don’t have to leave the office or interrupt your family time in the evenings. They have all the forms, (applications, leases, etc.), so you don’t need to go out and buy them or have an attorney draw them up. It’s a great package deal, IMNSHO.
I ended up with tenants who actually took better care of my place than I did and who paid their rent early every single month. And not only that, when they were ready to move out, they had a friend who’d visited and loved the place so much that they referred me to him to buy it – which he did!
Which brings me to my next point – think very hard about whether you want to be a landlord for the long-term. I didn’t realize when I did this that there were time restrictions on reinvesting after having converted my property to rental property from my primary residence for tax purposes. When my tenants were ready to move out, I had decided not to move back to St. Louis at all, so there was no reason to hold onto that property anymore on the chance that I might move back into it. It made more sense for me to simply sell it. However… I didn’t know that I had to buy something else immediately, in order to avoid paying huge capital gains taxes. I had been ill-advised that I had 2 years to turn around my money into a new home before the tax penalty would kick in. Well that would have been true had I never converted my condo into rental property, but once I did, that window went, well, out the window!
So before you do anything, check with an accountant and find out what your tax obligations are going to be!