How Property Management Software Can Help You Avoid These Mistakes

Whoops! We all make mistakes, but property management mistakes can come with a higher cost. They can compromise your relationships with tenants, vendors, and owners and have a financial impact on your business as well. According to the Houston Chronicle, one of the biggest challenges facing a property manager is how to keep all of those balls in the air. Whether you're challenged by keeping a regular maintenance schedule or struggling with the details of lease renewal, property management software can help you keep high-quality standards and avoid mistakes.

Due Diligence

As a property manager, one of your first interactions with a tenant is to make sure that you bring in the right people in the first place. You need to set up a strong screening process to reduce turnover and maintenance problems. The CCIM Institute stresses the importance of this due diligence, stating that property managers try to avoid these problems by qualifying tenants upfront, through credit, criminal, and financial checks. Set up an online application process to make things easier for your prospective tenants, and ensure that your process involves both credit and reference checks. Track this information as you go so that you can determine that your new tenant is the right fit.

Missing Maintenance

Missed maintenance is one of the biggest and most common mistakes you can make. If you skip maintenance on a property or fail to set up a consistent maintenance schedule, you miss opportunities to fix problems before they become emergencies. Use mobile property management system features to document problems during move out and inspections, and manage one-time and ongoing work orders using an ongoing maintenance schedule in your property management system.

Signing the Paperwork

You need to ensure that everything you do is well-documented and in accordance with the law. Using property management software, you can set up document management systems to track key documents such as lease agreements. With a solid move in, move out process, you can also set up custom protocols that lead you through the process of concluding your relationship with a past tenant and bringing on a new tenant. No one has a perfect memory, so this software can provide prompts and reminders to ensure that you never miss a step.

Communication Breakdown

One of the biggest frustrations of tenants, vendors, and owners are property managers who are slow to return calls or answer emails, especially when these feel urgent. If your tenant needs to speak with you about a serious maintenance issue or you haven't acted on an emergency repair, this can call your entire management company into question and damage your word of mouth reputation.

Solve communication problems by implementing easy communication strategies that work for you and your tenants. By adding an owner and tenant portal to your website, you'll give tenants and owners a place where they can get updated financial and repair information and ask questions. If you find that you need more on call support, you can also investigate the possibility of adding a call center to answer and track tenant questions.

“We wouldn’t be the company we are without Propertyware… it allows us (with only 2 people) to manage the entire business” – Jeff Shelton / 3rd Base Realty

You'll never be perfect, but you can develop better practices for rental property management. Property management software can help you avoid mistakes by providing software to back up and provide reminders about your property management processes. With Propertyware, your business will be on a solid footing when it comes to data management. Want to learn more about how our software products can build your business? Sign up for a free tour of Propertyware today.