The role of a property manager is ever-increasing. With daily financial management tasks like rent payments and invoice handling, most of their day is consumed by reporting, mailing and overseeing maintenance requests.
With so much to juggle, manually handling every aspect of your business can grow complicated and tedious. But it doesn’t need to be — with the right automated technology you can automate these processes, saving you time and minimising room for error.
People typically think of automation as futuristic technology with robots taking our jobs, but it can be as simple as minor improvements to everyday tasks.
Currently, 61% of property management companies use automation in their day-to-day. The most popular are tools for system automation and team management. Meanwhile, 35% of agencies are thinking about automating some of their procedures.
Here are four ways automating property management could transform the way you work.
1. Increase efficiency and reduce costs/ save time and boost revenues.
Research shows that yearly, employees devote 520 hours – equivalent to a whole workday each week – to monotonous tasks that could be automated.
Automation removes the routine tasks of property management, from handling paperwork to transaction tracking. Instead, it allows property managers to create simple workflows, streamlining communications and automatically notifying the right people about the right information at the right time. So you can allocate saved time and resources to increasing revenues and growing your portfolio. How great is that?
Concerned about how much time manual processes are costing you? 400 million days a year are wasted by UK employees on unnecessary tasks explains how you can save time and increase your revenue.
2. Streamline processes and eliminate risk.
There are loads of different areas of property management, and using one system to manage different processes means your information, documents, and data are together.
Systems like Arthur allow you to automate:
- document management
- communication
- maintenance
- task management
- integrations
- financial management and payment reconciliation.
Automation greatly reduces the risk of human error and bias. Not only does this protect the reputation of your property management operation, but it also, again, increases efficiency and avoids unexpected costs.
3. Enable growth.
Day-to-day property management service includes lots of repetitive, labour-intensive and time-consuming administrative tasks. For example, sending out rent reminders. Manual multi-tasking simply doesn’t work. It’s inefficient and can limit agency growth.
To effectively manage your portfolio, plus any future growth, you need processes that can handle the workload and scale with your business. Hiring more staff isn’t economical, and your staff aren’t infinitely resilient to tedious administrative tasks in a fast-paced stop-and-start environment.
Introducing an automation platform will provide flexibility to help you cope with the challenges growth brings, and trust us, your staff will thank you.
4. Increase tenant satisfaction.
As tenants expect better service, manual responses aren’t going to cut the mustard. The 2021 State of the Property Management Industry study reported that 61% of renters prefer to email or text their property manager.
Automation technology offers a faster and more efficient way to communicate with tenants. Better communication = happier tenants.
Using software like Arthur, people can report maintenance issues via an app and then monitor the progress of their report without having to contact you.
Once a repair is completed, the tenant who made the request can be notified that the issue is fixed. Automating tasks gives your team additional time to focus on other, more meaningful work, and tenants can access information quickly and easily.
Final thoughts
In a nutshell, property management software will reduce your manual labour time and cut your costs. Ultimately leading to improved properties, more successful property teams and, most importantly, happy tenants.
Research shows that up to 60% of occupations could have at least one-third of their job automated. Leaving them free to have conversations software can’t automate. It’s 2023, and time to embrace digital transformation or risk being left behind.
If you’d like to find out more about the benefits of automation, read How Digital Automation Can Save Your Agency £25k a Year.
*Disclaimer: this blog is only intended as a guide, and is not to be taken as legal advice.*
