My Path to Automation

[Ben Sears]

I've been reading a lot lately on automating your real estate business. This is great for me not only for the obvious reasons, but for the fact that I have two small kids at home that I'm in charge of several days a week. It's hard (and not fair) to pile them in the truck to meet contractors and shop for materials. I haven't completed a lot of automating yet, but I wanted to share the beginning stages of my journey in hopes that it will help out someone else. Mt company falls into two distinct divisions, rentals/property management and flips. It's my hope to automate my rentals first so that I can spend more time working on systems for my flip properties. 

-We're accepting rent through Cozy only. This eliminates getting a check and the mail and driving to the bank to deposit. The rent is automatically direct deposited and Cozy takes care of the late fees and rent invoicing. I'll print a statement monthly for bookkeeping. I plan on adopting their screening tools in the near future once our next rental is ready to go online. This will further assist in automating our rental process. 

- I'm using Microsoft Flow to automatically send out monthly statements to my clients for whom we manage properties. Flow allows me to edit and save a document as I normally would and then it is automatically emailed out to the owner on a certain date. 

- I have automatic payments set to pay owner's their monthly payment minus management fees. This works great except for I haven't figured out a system for subtracting out the various maintenance costs. I'm open for suggestions on this one. 

- I'm toying with the idea of using SnapInspect3 to conduct our Move-In, Move-Out, and periodic rental inspections. I would couple this with outsourcing the inspections to a part time employee. This software is pricey at $49/month but it allows inspection reports to be electronically generated and emailed with the touch of a button. I'd love to talk to someone that is using this software. 

- I've decided to reduce the time I'm swinging hammers on my rental properties. I'm reaching out to a handyman to begin handling this type of work. My hope is that in the future I can couple Cozy's maintenance requests with notification to a handyman somehow. This is a future work in progress. 

[Ben Sears]

@Joe Villeneuve I respectfully disagree. I started this journey as a general contractor and still enjoy swinging hammers. I think investors who haven't put sweat equity into their properties when they start are shorting themselves in knowledge of building construction and how the rehab process works. I know for a fact that I'm far more educated in the construction process than an investor who learned rehab out of a book. If you've never gotten your hands dirty I believe it's  much harder you know when your project is going right or wrong.