Too many reminders for you to remember?

Question

Just out of curiosity, does any of our fellow landlords here in this forum have trouble keeping up with many reminders for your rental properties?

As a landlord with just one townhouse, I already have constant reminders such as monthly rent reminder (12 times a year), quarterly hoa fees (4 times a year), seasonal heat pump check up (twice a year), air filter replacement (4 times a year).

All of these little things add up and it's becoming a serious pain in the butt.

I am curious if there's any landlords or property managers out there sharing the same pain as me, especially those with more than 1 rental properties.

P.S. I am thinking about writing a software to solve this problem by sending automatic reminders to myself or to my tenants via email, or text messages. Any suggestions or recommendations are welcomed :)

Frank Chin · Answer

Here's what I do.

1. Mortgage payments are on autopay, automatically deducted each month.

2. I have a service that rents are automatically debited from the tenants account, and credited to mine each month. Both tenant and myself get email reminders several days before. It's easier to convince the tenant of this when they first rent from you rather than afterwards.

3. I got a service contract for the heating system, and they notify us of scheduled tuneups.

As to other things, develop a checklist on and check once a month.

Roy N. · Answer

@Yongyi Xu

Most accounting software will allow you to schedule repeat payments / expenditures and will either schedule automatic payment or provide notification.

For maintenance issues, we maintain a calendar (we use our own mail/calendar server, but you could easily use Google) with all these events scheduled for each property.   Initially we maintained a separate calendar for each property, but as we've grown, that has changed to a separate calendar for each city/zone/neighbourhood.

Frank Chin · Answer

@ Yongyi

I use a service called ClearNow, which you can access at ClearNow.com: ClearNow  They charge a monthly fee, and currently I have one tenant on it, and it cost me $13.95/month.

There is another one, called Cozy, it's free, and there's been discussed here on this board. See discussion: Cozy

My wife and I are retired, and we can't hang around chasing tenants for the monthly rent. I can vouch for ClearNow, as I been a user for a while. The tenant account is debited on the 1st business day of the month, I get it on the 4th business day like clockwork.

Nicole A. · Answer

You can add repeating events/items to your calendar (Google is a good one). You put in the event once and there should be an option to set it as repeating. You set the timeframe to repeat every X amount of weeks, once a year, or whatever. Then you set it up to give you a reminder on that day or X amount of hours/days/weeks before the event.

Yongyi Xu · Answer

Hi @Frank Chin

What is the service that you are using that you would get automatic withdrawal from tenant's account? That sounds like a great idea! I would be interested in using that in case if I need to find new tenants

Yongyi Xu · Answer

Thanks for the reply Roy. This is amazing how you've grown to me. Hope I will get to that point one day.

Most of my payments are automatic except hoa because it's outdated and harder to set up. I ended up just using the old fashion checks

What type of mail/calendar server service did you use? What are the benefits of that compared to google?

Too many reminders for you to remember?

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