How to Use Property Management Software to Grow Your Business
At this point, you probably know that property management software can save you time and money.
Beyond that, though, it can also help you grow your business.
Marketing and advertising tools make it easier than ever to place your properties on numerous listing sites. And tenant screening features help you find the best tenants for your properties.
In this article, we’ll detail how to use property management software to expand your business.
Property management software makes it easy to set up more effective online applications.
Screening Tenants
Property management software can help you develop useful rental applications, a key part of the tenant screening process. These applications, when created well, will be a foundational piece for marketing efforts. The reason for this is that they will weed out bad tenants and help pull in good tenants.
The crux to creating your application is to stick to the same process every time for every applicant. When you use the same standards and ask identical questions of every applicant, you remain compliant with the Fair Housing Act.
A well-crafted rental application provides important information about a potential tenant that you could not learn otherwise. Beyond that, when joined with criminal records, credit history, and identity verification, an application can be used to determine if your applicant is being completely transparent.
When you receive applications, make sure to review them thoroughly. Your prospective tenant supplied you with important information. Call current and past employers and landlords. Prepare some questions and take notes. Following up is one of the best ways you can shine light on the quality and character of the applicant.
Tenant screening also involves criminal reports, eviction reports, and credit checks. We go through these in detail in a different article. They are particularly important parts of the process as well.
Tenant screening acts as a marketing tool because great tenants help you grow your business. People who take care of your property pay on time, and maintain communication, which frees up your time and pays critical dividends in the future.
Listing Sites
Attracting the interest of great tenants is the only way to get them to apply. Marketing and advertising tools can help you do this. These tools make marketing simpler than ever before.
Many tools allow you to syndicate your available listings to a plethora of websites across the internet. Ensure that key sites like Apartments.com and Realtor are included. Zillow may be a worthwhile option as well but know that they charge you to advertise on their site.
By using listing syndication, you can create a single listing within your property management software that you can then export to all major listing sites at once. This helps you maximize coverage while saving you hours of manual effort.
Crafting listings that appeal to certain renters is also part of finding great tenants. Share a lot of information about your property and set some expectations to gauge peoples’ genuine interest. Doing this will prevent wasted time for you and potential tenants. The better and more accurately described your property is from the outset, the more likely you are to engage people that will be the right fit.
Leverage Reporting
Property management software offers reports that provide invaluable insight on the state of your business. You can use these reports to enhance your marketing efforts. Reports help you get a clearer picture of your business as a whole and each aspect of it.
You can’t know what you don’t know. Analytics can show how approximately how much you should spend on marketing to generate the traffic needed to get ahead of upcoming vacancies or exposure. Instead of lowering prices, sometimes it’s best to adjust marketing spending. But you won’t have a clear idea of what to do without insightful data.
Benchmarking is another useful piece of the reporting pie. When you compare actual leasing, financial and operational data to a clarified peer set, you can make better marketing decisions based on more than intuition and experience.
Reporting helps with marketing because it allows you to see your business clearly. The strengths and weaknesses. The opportunities for growth and evolution. Your marketing strategy should be in lockstep with your business strategy. They are symbiotic after all.
Conclusion
Property management software isn’t just for managing your properties. It can also help grow your business.
Using tenant screening features, maximizing exposure through listing syndication, and leveraging reports are all great ways to grow your business with the help of software.
And there’s no time like the present to start using these tools.
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