The average American takes 11 paid vacation days a year. For busy property management, that number’s often much lower—especially if you’re running your business on top of individual properties in your portfolio.
Better together: Connect the software you use every day so you can get more done with tools you already have.
Reserve funds can be a lifeline for your association management business. Learn their ins and outs and how to set one up the right way.
Explore Open APIResisting the urge to micromanage your business enough to step away can be challenging. After all, you’re responsible for handling any issues quickly and being accessible to owners and tenants in an emergency.
How can you ensure your business runs smoothly, so that you can step away from time to time to prioritize your family and personal life?
From sharing resources that empower your staff to automating daily tasks, it’s possible to establish a foundation for smooth operations and steady growth without making the business overly dependent on you. This post will explore how to set up a well-oiled machine so you can step away for some well-earned R&R.
Keep Your Records Centralized
To truly unplug on your next vacation, you should consider making it easier to store and share records across your team.
A central hub for team members to retrieve contracts, leases, and more reduces the need for unnecessary back-and-forth. Similarly, the right tools will help you improve the visibility of how your business is performing while saving you time from flagging people down for the latest information (or from them flagging you down, too).
Your team can find the records they need to fulfill a request, or an owner can access a database or self-service dashboard to get the information they need to handle every maintenance request. Your team will know who to call to get in contact with your maintenance contact center, who can then assign a work order.
Perhaps most importantly, having a single source for all your records and a clear way for your team to access those records lets you set up procedures for any type of emergency from natural disasters and security threats to medical incidents and urgent repairs.
Here are 5 tools to help centralize your records.
#1. CRM Tools to Keep Up with Your Contacts
Over the course of the year, you’re going to interact with hundreds of prospective clients. You’ll need one place to store all their information, interactions, and even conversation history in one place. A customer relationship management platform (CRM) can help centralize all that information so you can stay in touch with your leads and continuously move them down the funnel.
LeadSimple® is a CRM platform designed for property managers. It features a user-friendly interface that makes managing leads and converting them into tenants or owners easy. The platform stores your contacts in one place, ensuring a single source of truth for your marketing and sales teams. LeadSimple also simplifies your tasks, from automatically following up on leads to tracking sales activity, all within one easy-to-use platform.
For a deeper dive into the best CRMs in the market, read our roundup of the four best CRMs for property businesses.
#2. Tools to Store Owner and Property Data Securely
Having all your leads in one database is essential, as is having your current owner information and properties. Receipts, leases, and email threads can easily get lost in the shuffle. An owner portal centralizes all your owner information and documents in one place, so you can easily share them with your team.
The shareability of your internal data with your team is critical to growth, too. Tools like Buildium’s analytics and insights hub break down data silos by offering real-time performance data insights and reports to help your team stay informed via easy-to-read visualizations.
#3. Tools to Organize Tenant and Lease Records
Drafting a new lease, sending it out, and collecting signatures can be slow and cumbersome without the right tools. A centralized system for leasing gives any team member access to tenant and lease details and the relevant paperwork to ensure leases are signed as quickly as possible.
To better coordinate the leasing process, a Resident Center helps track all tenant communication in one place. It records every conversation, and property managers can also send emails, schedule announcements, and automatically notify tenants with important information via text or email.
#4. Tools to Track Maintenance Work and Repairs
Clear communication is crucial for maintenance work. Tracking maintenance requests helps with timely vendor payments and expense management, minimizing downtime and ensuring accurate bookkeeping.
Buildium’s maintenance request management tools make tracking, managing, and recording every maintenance request easy. Its collaborative features enable residents, owners, and employees to submit work orders and automatically receive updates from any device.
#5. Tools to Maintain Accurate Financial and Accounting Records
As noted above, having all your financial records in one place keeps your business organized, minimizes mistakes, and improves communication with your team. Purpose-built accounting software can track all your transactions in one place, providing your accountant and financial advisors with a clear picture of your business’ financial health.
However, financial records are not just about accounting. Buildium’s company financial tools offer shareable snapshots of your company’s cash, net income, and incoming rent, fees, and security deposits. Your team can enter and update financial records and quickly access critical financial metrics through real-time reports.
Automate Work Wherever You Can
Once you’ve set your records up for easier visibility and collaboration with your team, you’ll be able to start automating workflows so that your residents and owners have 24/7 support without you having to be constantly on call.
The best part is many of the tools we introduced above can also directly automate processes for you. To give you a better sense of how this works, let’s first evaluate the tasks best suited for automation. They typically fall into these four major buckets:
The Day-to-Day: This includes your accounting system—from bookkeeping and collecting payments to paying vendors and more. And of course, recording all your transactions.
Business Communication: Keeping an open, uninterrupted line with owners and prospective owners is essential to your business. Requests from tenants and sharing announcements also fall into this bucket.
Property Maintenance: Receiving, fielding and documenting work orders keeps properties safe and residents happy. And there’s always scheduled regular upkeep, too.
Lease Management: Vacancies happen—but filling them could be your #1 priority. Key tasks include showing units, managing applications, screening applicants, and handling lease agreement signing, move-in and move-out.
Keeping these categories in mind, here are some specific tasks you can automate.
The Day-to-Day: Automate Your To-Do List
Bookkeeping
The more properties you manage, the more complicated your bookkeeping will be. Using the right technology can simplify accounting and help you prepare for unexpected situations. Purpose-built software for property businesses makes it easier to manage cash flow, with features like property management-focused charts of accounts, automatic rent collection, and property-specific tax forms.
Clyr® is an AI-driven expense management and AP automation tool designed to help property businesses improve their finances by automating repetitive tasks like matching receipts to transactions, creating bills, and reconciling accounts. Clyr enables you to manage and track your finances within your budget constraints effectively.
Buildium’s automatic bank reconciliation can save hours by eliminating discrepancies and ensuring that your books are adjusted, corrected, and ready for tax season. If done manually, it would involve tedious data entry and cross-referencing, not to mention additional room for human error.
Collections Process
Dealing with late rent payments can be stressful. It takes a lot of time and resources to track down payments, communicate with uncooperative tenants, and ensure you follow all the legal requirements and regulations. And due to its urgent nature, it’s not something that can wait until you return from vacation. So why not automate it?
Hunter Warfield® manages collections on your behalf while ensuring compliance with local laws. Their collectors are extensively trained to handle collection, negotiation, and lending virtually without requiring any involvement from your team.
Business Communication: Timely Updates, Consistent Messaging
Rent payment deadlines, lease renewal dates, maintenance requests, and community events are all important events that require communication between tenants and property owners. These can be automated so payments are made on time and leases get signed on time, so you’re not wasting time hunting down renewals.
A tool like Buildium’s Resident Center can streamline communication by automating text, email, or chat notifications.
Property Maintenance: Make Quick Work of Work Orders
Handling maintenance requests involves a variety of time-consuming tasks, such as receiving and responding to requests, coordinating with vendors, updating tickets, and processing payments. These responsibilities can quickly become overwhelming, but fortunately, can be automated.
Property Meld® is a property maintenance software that offers automated workflows, smart responses, centralized scheduling, and communication tools to streamline maintenance.
Alternatively, RealPage’s Maintenance Contact Center handles every maintenance request 24/7/365. The call center receives and assigns work orders while updating your maintenance requests in real-time, so you can handle actually resolving issues rather than answering calls.
Lease Management: Fill Your Vacancies Faster
Scheduling showings for prospective tenants or buyers to visit and view your property can get tiring. While finding a time that works for everybody is already tedious, communicating directions, maintaining an organized calendar, following up, and sending reminders make it even more complicated.
A solution like ShowingHero® can help automate showings from start to finish. It takes all your rental lead calls and emails and automatically schedules a showing around your schedule. With secure Self-Tour integration, it can also show properties without an agent present. Finally, it automatically follows up with prospective tenants to get prospects to move in as quickly as possible.
Tenant Turner® syndicates your rentals to all the major listing sites, and manages prospective tenants’ phone calls, emails, and text messages to schedule showings automatically. Whether you use a leasing agent, lockbox, or a smart lock, Tenant Turner organizes showings seamlessly.
The Next Level: Use an Open API to Create Custom Automated Workflows
There may be a scenario where your technology stack might need help automating tasks specific to your business. Take advantage of an open API that plugs your current software with other applications to ensure your data flows seamlessly between applications. For example, you may want to use your Buildium CRM data with Showing Hero’s automated showing scheduler to ensure you’re keeping a record of every showing and communication history.
Technology You Can Trust Both On and Off the Clock
Building a reliable system to ensure your business runs smoothly starts with choosing the right technology to support it. Assessing your needs and automating as much as possible will allow you to finally take that well-deserved vacation and hire the right people to help run the ship while you’re gone.
The right all-in-one software built for property businesses can serve as the foundation for your business. A purpose-built solution like Buildium can help your team manage all your operations in one place, from anywhere. From accounting to listing syndication, Buildium can help simplify your lead-to-lease process by automating the redundant tasks, while empowering your team to communicate more effectively.
You can test Buildium for free with a 14-day, no-risk trial to automate your business reliably, allowing you to grow the business and even step away to go on that much-needed vacation you’ve been postponing.
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