Efficiency is key for a landlord with many responsibilities.
If you manage your own rental business, you don’t have any time to waste. You have your hands full with rental advertising, tenant screening, leasing, maintenance, showings, and more.
Fortunately, there are many ways to maximize efficiency and reduce waste in your everyday rental activities. From rent collection to how you post your listings, property management software organizes your business so that you can spend your valuable time on actionable steps that have a real impact on your business’s future.
Here are five ways that property management software helps you increase the efficiency of your business.
1. Collect Rent Online
The first thing you can do to maximize efficiency is to collect rent online. Online rent collection works by integrating with an online payment portal. Tenants can pay via credit, debit, or ACH transfer, and are free to submit their payments whenever and wherever is most convenient for them.
When you collect rent online, there’s no need to make multiple trips to the bank each month. You also don’t have to wait for cash and checks to arrive in the mail. If you want a renter-centric CRM and make property management easier for you, you can view it now here.
Once processed, all payments can be viewed right from your computer or mobile device.
2. Use a Maintenance Portal
Traditional maintenance management can lead to serious inefficiencies in your business.
If you don’t have an established procedure for tenants to make maintenance requests, you might have to search for tickets in multiple imboxes or keep track of them by hand. It’s easy to lose the status of various projects or forget to follow up with a tenant about a repair.
A digital maintenance portal solves these problems. Instead of organizing maintenance requests yourself, let your software do this. With property management software, you can see all your active maintenance requests on the same page and prioritize the most urgent. You can also set notifications for important maintenance tasks and check their status throughout the process.
Maintenance features save you the time and effort of manually tracking each repair or request while simultaneously providing a user-friendly experience for tenants.
3. Try Rental Accounting Software
If you scramble to file your tax returns with the IRS each year, it might be because you’re trying to juggle tax preparation on top of all your typical rental responsibilities. Try using rental accounting software to streamline your tax preparation and bookkeeping.
With a rental accounting application like QuickBooks, your rent payments and invoices are automatically integrated into a comprehensive accounting platform. You can view your KPIs (key performance indicators), track financial analytics, and quickly make decisions based on insights garnered by profit/loss reports.
Rental accounting software also helps you prepare for tax season. Are you unsure about which deductions you qualify for and how to report them to the IRS? With rental accounting software, you can skip the lengthy tax manual and move on to saving with deductions.
4. Tenant Screening
Property management software also saves time during tenant screening.
The tenant screening feature on your software platform can pull the most important information from credit and criminal histories for your evaluation. On some platforms, you can even configure your software to automatically perform credit checks when renters apply.
While you should always make the final decision on all tenants, there’s no need to waste time pre-qualifying tenants who clearly aren’t a good fit for your properties. With automation and AI-based programming, your software can weed out unqualified candidates and waste less time on their applications.
5. Listing Syndication Software
Finally, listing syndication software is an excellent time-saver for landlords tired of managing their listings across multiple platforms. With listing syndication, you write one rental listing for your property and upload it to multiple listing sites (including Zillow, Apartments.com, and more) in one step.
In addition to minimizing the time you spend reuploading the same information, listing syndication software has the added benefit of ensuring your ads are consistent across the internet.
Maximize Efficiency with Property Management Software
As technology and automation improve, new property management solutions are increasingly prevalent. Features like online rent collection, maintenance management, digital accounting, automated screening, and listing syndication can significantly ease the strain of managing your business in an unpredictable market. By taking advantage of all the tools and resources on your property management software, you can eliminate extraneous time-wasters and focus on what’s most important in your rental business.
