According to Bain & Company, 60% of business leaders plan to invest more in automation. They believe that this tool can grant them competitive advantages in the market. Automating repetitive tasks will enable you to spend more time focusing on important things like taking on more clients and investing in new listings.
With that, here are some of the areas of property management that you can automate with software solutions.
1. Payment processing
A whole chunk of property management entails processing payments. This includes collecting rents, paying bills and maintenance fees, and receiving down payments. Doing all these tasks manually can get exhausting in the long run. Not to mention, any error in computations or billings can have significant impacts on your business.
Lighten up your workload by allocating these tasks to a property management automation. Using software can make rent collections and bills payment completely hands-free. No more knocking on doors and writing on checks. You can simply have the software deduct the fees directly from your tenants’ bank accounts. Likewise, you can program it to automatically pay your monthly maintenance fees without further human interference.
2. Scheduling and bookings
Keeping track of all your appointments and bookings can be time-consuming. You usually end up with lengthy back-and-forth emails with your clients just to confirm a single meeting! Likewise, it can be tough organizing your schedules to ensure that none of your appointments or bookings overlap.
With property management workflow automation, you can do away with your phone calls, emails, and planners. You can integrate it with your emails to directly pen in appointments on your calendar based on your conversations with clients. Most importantly, it notifies you of possible overlaps so you can adjust your schedule accordingly. And if you are renting out several properties at once, you can use an Airbnb property management software to help you synchronize all your bookings across multiple channels at once.
3. Communication
Nowadays, automations are getting smarter and more sophisticated than ever. It has even come to a point where you can use automation to communicate with your clients, tenants, and maintenance crew. With just a few clicks, you can send emails, notifications, and requests to anyone.
You can use software to automatically remind tenants of their rent’s due date each month. Likewise, you can implement a ticketing system when it comes to maintenance requests. This way, there’s no need for you to play middleman between your tenants/clients and crew. A cloud-based property management software can also serve as a client/tenant portal. This can give them direct access to services and documents such as request forms, invoices, and appointment scheduling.
4. Sales and marketing
You can automate many aspects of sales and marketing using software solutions. It reduces the time and cost of attracting and converting leads.
For example, you can use software to attract leads using your website. With call-to-action banners, your visitors can subscribe for any updates or offers from your business. From there, your software can automatically send emails or SMS messages for anything that might catch their interest.
You have numerous options for sales and marketing automation software. Nonetheless, consider sticking to one that is dedicated to property management. One of the benefits of a property management software is that its tools and functions are specifically designed to optimize the tenant acquisition process. This makes it more compatible with your current sales and marketing strategies.
5. Data and analytics
Leveraging data and analytics can help improve your property management processes. But the actual process of gathering, analyzing, and summarizing them can be time-consuming. As a result, many property managers tend to overlook this task or completely do away with it. If that’s the case, you are missing out on a lot of valuable information that can help with business growth.
Fortunately, the majority of software solutions nowadays offer data and analytics tools. It will automatically gather data from every aspect of your processes. You can gain information such as your website traffic, competitors’ prices/performance, results of your marketing campaigns, and more. Moreover, these software programs can analyze and present this data into more digestible formats, allowing you to get all the information you need at a glance.
Embracing automation
Property management is a demanding job. It requires you to juggle multiple tasks at once. Worse, these tasks tend to get repetitive and menial at the end. As a result, you might find your productivity and efficiency flagging down in the long run.
By using automation, you can reduce your current workload and focus on more important aspects of property management. To start, check out Hostify. It’s a PMS tool built for vacation rental businesses to synchronize all their transactions across different platforms and services.
