Is It Time to Update Your Property Management Programs?
Is it time for an upgrade? Updating your business practices can lead to better relationships with tenants, owners, and vendors. It also helps ensure that your properties shine. Deepen your understanding of your business and manage it more effectively with rental property management software.
Schedule Maintenance
As a property management professional, investing in property maintenance is one of your key roles. This process helps prevent large repairs and keep tenants and owners happy. However, getting organized can be difficult, especially if you're managing tasks through phone calls, emails, and slips of paper. Coordinate your maintenance with rental property management software instead, and you'll not only be able to track what's been done, you'll be able to see what's coming up and communicate this to owners and tenants as required.
You renovate properties: now renovate your property management programs.
Inspect Properties and Address Repairs
Property inspections give you a status report on your properties. However, all too often, they're not a part of regular property management programs. According to the Bigger Pockets blog, many landlords "likely have never 'formally' inspected their properties." Instituting a well-documented move-in, move-out inspection process and performing random inspections helps you find problems before they become severe. If a stairway railing is loose and you don't fix it, someone could fall. If you do fix it, then you become a proactive and positive landlord in your tenants' eyes. Find those problems before they become serious and you'll save money and improve tenant relationships.
Understand Expenses
From vendors who are unpaid to rents that you need to track down every month, finances can be a challenge for rental property management companies that are focused on urgent property management concerns. However, tracking your accounts receivable and payable, instituting online payment processes, and documenting invoices through online files can save you time in the future. When you file and integrate your accounting online, you'll be able to better understand your financial picture and improve your property and tenant management processes.
Organize Property Information
The information you gather about your properties matters. According to Property Management Insider, "the performance of an apartment community's operations segment is critical to the bottom-line success of a portfolio - and that includes streamlining back-office functionalities, budgeting, spend management, document management and more." This property information gives you a clear record of what's happening at a property so that you can refer back to it when you need to pay a vendor or manage a maintenance problem. It also allows you to perform the analyses you need to understand the trends in your property management business.
Create and Analyze Reports
The reports that you create using landlord management software programs have the potential to help you understand the state of your properties, get insight into property trends, and develop better processes to address them. For example, you may notice homes in a certain area are experiencing a similar maintenance concern because that neighborhood was built at the same time. You can determine whether to undertake a larger maintenance program that could address this concern and save you money in the long term. Reports help you understand the status of your business, and with rental property management software that crunches the data for you, data analysis becomes much simpler.
As you work to implement better management processes for your properties, look to Propertyware for help. Our landlord management tools and tenant management software allow you to manage and thoroughly understand the many aspects of your property management business. Take a free tour of Propertyware today.