As any property manager knows, running a rental business means wearing a lot of hats. Property management encompasses a wide range of responsibilities, from advertising vacant units and screening potential tenants to overseeing current residents and maintaining properties.
Fortunately, as technology continues to advance, this role is becoming less about execution and more about delegation. More specifically, identifying tasks that can be automated and managing them within the right software tool.
Let’s explore the ways property managers can automate and streamline some of their most time-consuming tasks, and how to start taking those repetitive tasks off your plate.
Proptech: Understanding the 2024 Landscape
Before diving into specific automation tasks, let’s start with the concept of Proptech and how it’s developed over the years. Property technology, or Proptech, refers to the use of technology to improve the way we research, rent, buy, sell, and manage real estate.
While many think of Proptech as a new area of development, its origins have been traced back to the 1980s with the advent of the personal computer by Apple and IBM. This initial invention enabled the rise of tools like customer relationship management (CRM) systems and financial analysis tools. Most notably, 1985 marked the launch of Microsoft Excel, which many property managers still use today.
Fast forward to 2024, and the proptech landscape has transformed dramatically. We’re seeing tech-forward property management companies start to experiment with more innovative tech. For instance, some are offering virtual reality (VR) tours to enable potential tenants all over the world to view their properties. Others are using artificial intelligence to create personalized property listings based on client preferences.
However, despite all of the cutting-edge advancements in the industry, many leasing offices are still struggling to incorporate tech into more basic tasks. Think about how much time your team spends sorting through their email, manually entering data, and managing spreadsheets. Before venturing into brand-new technology, it’s important to make sure that your team is leveraging automation as much as possible to unlock efficiency.
Top Property Management Automation Tasks
When it comes to automating your property management workflow, you want to start with steps that are necessary but don’t require strategy or creativity from your team. These tasks are often time-consuming, repetitive, and prone to manual errors. While this may look different for every rental business, there are a few key areas that we recommend starting with.
1. Tenant Screening
Thorough tenant screening is the foundation of successful property management. This process helps ensure you’re renting to responsible individuals who will care for your property and pay rent on time. However, screening your tenants can be a long multi-step process involving a number of manual tasks.
For instance, income verification is a crucial step in establishing a tenant’s financial reliability, but it can introduce a lot of administrative work. Whether you’re gathering proof of income through pay stubs, bank statements, or tax returns, your team needs to spend time collecting, verifying, and storing these documents. But since it’s too risky to skip, leasing offices often spend days overseeing this process for each applicant.
That’s why some property software solutions allow you to automatically pull together and analyze necessary information to save time. Some applications like RentRedi even offer a solution to automatically tackle the entire screening process at once, from background checks to Proof of Income verification.
2. Application + Lease Management
Bringing on a new tenant comes with a lot of paperwork, from the initial application to the lease and any attached addendums. Especially when you’re managing a multifamily community, these documents can pile up fast.
Many digital lease management systems streamline the entire leasing process. From lease creation and customization to e-signature capabilities, automation reduces paperwork and minimizes errors. Some solutions even include renewal reminders to ensure that lease renewals are handled promptly, reducing vacancy rates.
3. Insurance Verification and Monitoring
Verifying renters insurance is an essential step in protecting your property from unexpected damages. Without an airtight process to vet your residents’ coverage, your tenants may be vulnerable to financial troubles from a number of perils, including theft, fire, or tornadoes. In some cases, this might end up coming back to you, either through renter disputes or legal action.
However, verifying coverage is not as simple as it sounds. Even manually reviewing declaration pages at move-in can leave you open to fraudulent documents or prematurely canceled policies.
That’s why automating this process is critical to building your verification process. Modern insurance verification solutions enable you to pull your residents’ insurance information directly from the source to verify that it adequately meets your requirements at the time of review.
Some also include insurance monitoring, which periodically reconnects with the carrier to ensure that the coverage remains active throughout the lease. While this would be arduous and costly to perform internally for all of your residents, the automated process provides crucial protection for your rental units.
4. Rent Collection
Rent collection is arguably the most critical aspect in your property management operations. Handling this task efficiently is not only crucial to facilitating cash flow; it’s also important in maintaining trust with your residents.
Messing up payment processing or issuing an accidental late fee can spark unnecessary anxiety for your tenants– not to mention creating confusion in your accounting ledger. That’s why it’s important to run a reliable system to keep everything on track.
Online rent collection systems have become a game-changer in property management. The Zipdo Education Report 2024 reveals that 67% of property managers feel that online rent payments have a positive impact on their business. These systems often include features like automatic reminders, late fee calculations, and automated reconciliation and reporting, making the rent collection process smoother for both managers and tenants.
Some modern property management programs even allow residents to automate their rental payments with autopay. Not only does this improve the renter experience, but it also helps landlords receive more timely payments. According to recent data, units rented by a tenant using autopay have a 99% on-time payment rate, compared to 88% for those without autopay.
5. Maintenance Handling
Proactive maintenance is key to preserving your property’s value and keeping tenants satisfied. Unfortunately, it can also require a lot of time and effort to do right. Between reviewing repair requests, communicating with tenants and contractors, and keeping records of all maintenance activities, maintaining your apartment servicing system is practically a full-time job.
By using your property management system to handle your maintenance requests and tracking, you can significantly improve response times and overall resident experience while decreasing your team’s workload. With the ROI property managers see from automating this task, it’s no surprise that 80% believe that maintenance tracking software is crucial to their operations.
6. Marketing
Filling your rental units is an oft overlooked aspect of property management. However, that doesn’t make it any less critical. Effective marketing reduces vacancy periods and helps you find the best fit for your rental.
However, it can also be pretty time-consuming. Listing your units is a multi-step process, from staging and taking photos to posting on rental websites. Then, once everything is published, you’ll still need to spend time coordinating and hosting tours for prospective tenants.
Automating marketing efforts can help property managers reach a wider audience more efficiently. Many property management solutions allow automated listing syndication across multiple platforms like Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com. Some even include virtual tour scheduling and management to make it easier for potential tenants to view properties at their convenience.
Property Management Automation in Action
To get a clearer picture of what property management automation looks like in practice, consider RentRedi, an end-to-end landlord software built to streamline property management.
This solution centralizes all of your property management tasks, along with several integrations, to reduce friction throughout the process. Its mobile and online offerings include streamlined rent payments, tenant screening, maintenance management, property listing, document management, and more.
Let’s use RentRedi’s application to see what automated rental payments could look like for your business.
With RentRedi’s rent collection feature, property managers can enable individual payments for each of their properties. They just need to add each property with a connected account, and configure their settings, including late timing, late fees, and accepted payment types. They can also create custom notifications to go out to tenants before payment is due.
Once these are set up, the property manager can receive payments directly to their connected accounts and export accounting data from the app. They can also get a complete view of their portfolio to track payment status and take action if needed.
RentRedi also offers features to make the payment process more seamless from the tenant’s side. With the platform’s auto-pay feature, residents can set up a date and amount to be automatically paid each month. With this “set it and forget it” option, they don’t need to worry about logging in throughout the month or incurring unnecessary late fees.
Additionally, RentRedi’s tenant platform includes Credit Boost, a rent reporting feature that allows tenants to report their on-time rent payments to credit bureaus and improve their credit scores. This gives a major advantage to responsible renters aiming to build their credit. In turn, it also provides an incentive for timely payments. A report by RentRedi found that on-time payments average 93% for credit-boosting users, compared to 82% among non-credit-boosting users.
Automating processes like this can propel your business forward in more ways than one. Not only does it cut down on manual work and free up internal bandwidth, but it can also improve the resident experience and strengthen your working relationship.
Start Automating Your Property Management Business
As we navigate the digital age, embracing automation in property management is no longer optional—it’s essential for staying competitive and meeting the evolving expectations of tenants and property owners. By adopting a property management solution that allows you to automate repetitive processes in your day-to-day, you can improve efficiency and dedicate more time to value-added tasks.