Property management is a challenging business. If you are a property manager, you need to use all the tools at your disposal to make your work easier. One tool that can save you time and stress is automation.
There are certain duties of a property manager that are quite repetitive. Utilizing automation to reduce your day-to-day work means more free time to focus on other parts of your business. Keep reading to learn a few automation tasks that property management consultants recommend putting to work.
Scheduling Calls and Appointments
Scheduling calls and appointments is a task that typically involves a lot of time and effort. It is also expensive and not as productive as other jobs a property manager might have.
Call scheduling and handling appointments can be outsourced to professional property management companies. But if you only have a property or two and still want to take your own calls, you can instead use an app or online tool for help. HubSpot is one of the best tools to use in this regard. Calendly is another useful appointment scheduling tool.
Automating the scheduling of calls and appointments avoids issues such as overbooking, double booking, and missed calls. It will make your property management business much more efficient and productive.
Responding to Client’s Emails
Emails are another significant part of managing your business. As a property manager, you're likely constantly responding to email from existing clients and potential ones as well through email marketing. Just like with call scheduling, if you're experiencing a high volume of incoming messages, you'll likely want to enlist the help of a property management consultant. This ensures that no messages slip through the cracks, and customizes and personalizes your customer experience.
But if you aren't quite ready to take that step, you have options in the meantime. You can automate your email responses by using an autoresponder. An autoresponder is a software that will automatically respond to emails in a timely manner. The autoresponder can be programmed with whatever message you want to send to your email list.
Receiving Maintenance Requests and Scheduling Repairs
Handling maintenance request for your renters is incredibly important, but it's also time-consuming. From changing air filters or performing seasonal maintenance on a set schedule to juggling those 3 a.m. emergency calls, maintenance alone can be a full-time job, even if you have just a few properties.
Maintenance requests can also be automated and it will save you time and money. With a little help from a property management consultant, you can utilize a platform where tenants can make maintenance requests and have the system respond to and schedule them automatically. This means less work for you, without leaving your tenants hanging.
FAQ Responses
The questions that a property manager gets from existing and potential clients are often largely the same. Answering the same questions again and again takes time away from other property management tasks.
Automating your FAQ responses allows you to quickly answer questions and provide even better customer service. Having an automated and easily accessible FAQ page will help potential clients better understand your business. It will also help improve site navigation and increase its visibility.
The best way to automate FAQ responses is to use an integrated chatbot. The chatbot will answer any of the site visitor’s queries at any time, day or night.
Resident Notifications
As a property management company, you need to regularly apprise the residents of the building of various issues. If you manage buildings with hundreds of tenants, notifying all the residents of all the possible issues can be very cumbersome.
Some of the notifications a property manager needs to provide to tenants include past-due rent notices, lease renewals, and eviction notices, among others. Each of these notices can be automatically sent directly from a platform to the relevant recipients. Not only does this save you time, but it can help ensure that you never forget to send a message or send it to the wrong person.
Sales and Marketing Tasks
Keeping your properties rented and avoiding vacancies means keeping a steady flow of rental income. To that end, the property manager has to conduct various marketing tasks to ensure that the vacancies in the property are filled as quickly and efficiently as possible.
However, these tasks can take a considerable amount of time, effort, and funds. For example, setting up a listing or sending email responses to potential renter are quite the hassle. While there are a few ways to automate your marketing and sales tasks, none are as effective as enlisting the help of a property management consultant. They'll not only be able to take tasks like creating listings and screening tenants off your hands, but they'll also put their skills and experience to work to reduce costly vacancies.
To learn more about how a property management consultant can help you streamline and automate your operations, contact us today!