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With today’s technology, there is no reason why landlords should be doing all of their laborious tasks manually. You have access to property management software and other assistive technologies that can make your most tedious work a breeze. Rather than wasting your valuable time sending out emails reminding tenants to pay rent, you could be more productive than ever.
Below is a list of 8 processes that landlords should automate:
- Rent collection
- Tenant screenings
- Maintenance requests
- Communication
- Scheduling for showings
- Rental applications
- Lease signing
- Late fees
We will explain why you should automate these processes and how to get started. You’ll be working at maximum efficiency in no time.
#1 Automate Rent Collection
One of the most time-consuming tasks a landlord faces is collecting rent. When tenants pay manually through traditional methods, you have to count their cash, deposit their checks at the bank, and write out receipts. If you encourage tenants to pay online and automate their monthly payments, however, this is a headache you’ll no longer have. Tenants can automate their payments through your property management software or online bill pay.
#2 Automate Tenant Screenings
To maximize monthly revenue, landlords must minimize turnover. A huge factor at play here is tenant screening. In order to properly vet a prospective tenant, you should complete credit report checks, past landlord checks, employer checks, and county level criminal checks. This is hard to do quickly if you’re doing it manually. A good property management software will have tenant screening built into their offered services. This allows for quick reporting that requires no additional work on your part.
#3 Automate Maintenance Requests
If all of your maintenance requests come in through your email inbox, they can be a lot to sort through and even get lost in the shuffle. This can lead to disgruntled tenants and further damage to your property. Automating maintenance requests is made easy with property management software. Most will have a portal that allows tenants to specify their maintenance requests and ensures that the requests get to the proper staff.
#4 Automate Communication
Sending out reminder emails about rent payments, lease renewals, and any other routine info can be surprisingly time consuming. Automating your communications is a simple way to increase productivity. You can set automated email reminders to go out at key times with property management software. This will minimize late payments, decrease preventable inquiries, and increase your team’s efficiency.
#5 Automate Scheduling for Showings
Setting up times for showings can create a lot of unnecessary back and forth between you and your prospective tenants. Simplifying this process creates a better experience for you and your tenant. There are a multitude of platforms that allow prospective tenants to schedule showings that coincide with the availability on your Google calendar. You can link to the scheduling platform of your choice on the listing sites you use.
#6 Automate Rental Applications
The time between when a tenant views your listing, requests an application, fills it out, and gets it back to you can take days. This is valuable time that your unit remains vacant. Automating rental applications simplifies the process and leads to quicker turnover. Any good property management software will allow you to link to your rental application directly on your listings.
#7 Automate Lease Signing
Giving tenants time to review their lease and scheduling a time for them to come in to sign it can be an added headache, so why not just avoid it? Many property management software allows for online lease signing. This means that tenants can review and sign their lease on their time. You’ll even be able to keep a record of the signed lease in the management platform so that you and your tenants can reference it with ease.
#8 Automate Late Fees
No one likes to be the bad guy, but sometimes you just have to be. Most property management software allows you to set automatic late fees for tenants who are late on their rent payments. You can typically set a grace period, which will help maintain a cordial tenant-landlord relationship. The fee will apply after your set grace period and for the rate that you’ve chosen. This way, you can avoid the awkward conversation of excuses when you tell a tenant they have to pay the late fee mentioned in their lease.
Automating Should be Automatic
Landlords tend to be jacks of all trades. They deal with legal issues, maintenance work, marketing schemes, customer service, and so much more. That’s just a part of the job. But there are many processes that can be automated to increase productivity and minimize the time spent on tedious tasks. When given the tools to automate a process, you shouldn’t be asking yourself whether or not you should do it. The answer should be automatic — yes!
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