Rental Property Investor · Marietta, GA · Member since 2020 · 22 posts · 4 votes
Hi,
I'm curious as to what systems you have in place to help manage your properties. I'm a newbie and want to figure out a system that works for me before purchasing my first property.
Hey @Jake Burgdorf! I want to share a few things that I've done here and then implore you.
Systems: I have a number of systems in place, almost all of them coming from @Brandon Turner's book on Managing Rental Properties.
- Keep commonly bunched forms in folders on a service like Dropbox or Google Drive. These include "new application packet", "new tenant packet", "Late payment packet", and "Move-Out packet." This makes it easy to find these and delegate these steps when possible.
- Advertise rentals on Zillow, collect rent on Cozy or Zillow, and integrate the tenants into my CRM to proactively stay in touch.
- Use STESSA to track returns. It's amazing and visual.
Now to the imploring:
- Don't learn AND THEN buy . . . you should and will NEVER be done learning and you will encounter yet another entire set of things you need to learn once you start operating rental properties. Get started sooner, before you know all the answers.
- Self-feed as much as possible. Cozy.co and the Innago both have websites that you can find easily and much quicker than the speed with with we will see a reply and be back to the question to answer it. As much as you can, make your knee-jerk reaction "I'll go find that info" and then, once you hit walls you can't answer with a simple google search, ask :)
I've been improved by this community more than I can express, and I'm thankful for the opportunity to help others along the way! Go out there and get it, Jake!
@Jake Burgdorf I use Cozy.co for managing my properties and would recommend it to any newer investor. It makes rent collection very easy and it even has a way for tenants to report repair issues.
Innago.com has been a real help to us to keep our apps, tenants, leases, properties, maintenance request tracking, and rent collection in one place. We are transitioning away from Cozy.co because Innago.com has more features and we get our rent faster.
Hey @Jake Burgdorf! I want to share a few things that I've done here and then implore you.
Systems: I have a number of systems in place, almost all of them coming from @Brandon Turner's book on Managing Rental Properties.
- Keep commonly bunched forms in folders on a service like Dropbox or Google Drive. These include "new application packet", "new tenant packet", "Late payment packet", and "Move-Out packet." This makes it easy to find these and delegate these steps when possible.
- Advertise rentals on Zillow, collect rent on Cozy or Zillow, and integrate the tenants into my CRM to proactively stay in touch.
- Use STESSA to track returns. It's amazing and visual.
Now to the imploring:
- Don't learn AND THEN buy . . . you should and will NEVER be done learning and you will encounter yet another entire set of things you need to learn once you start operating rental properties. Get started sooner, before you know all the answers.
- Self-feed as much as possible. Cozy.co and the Innago both have websites that you can find easily and much quicker than the speed with with we will see a reply and be back to the question to answer it. As much as you can, make your knee-jerk reaction "I'll go find that info" and then, once you hit walls you can't answer with a simple google search, ask :)
I've been improved by this community more than I can express, and I'm thankful for the opportunity to help others along the way! Go out there and get it, Jake!
To the best of your current knowledge, create a step-by-step check list by writing down all the steps you think you need to take to have your place rented and managing it. Use it when you actually placing a tenant and managing a unit. Adjust the list accordingly as you gain experience and knowledge. Eventually you can use some software/apps, but pen and paper or a Word/Google Doc is fine for now.
Came here to say pretty much exactly what @Will Fraser said in his last two points!
Another key concept is that your first system is rarely the best or most efficient, so always be willing to adjust as needed (but don't change every time you hit a snag; there's a fine balance there).
I use TenantCloud to manage my rentals. With it I can collect rents (I don't actually do this through TenantCloud but it is an option). I can message tenants through it and they can submit maintenance requests within the system. I also enter all of my income and expenses into it. It sends me and the tenants emails and notifications of things like when leases expire, when a tenant is late on the rent, and it create a variety of reports including reports for tax preparers.
@Jake Burgdorf I second what @John Warren said, Cozy is great. I use it as well and it’s FREE for the landlord. The tenant pays an application fee of $40 for a background check and credit report and they can also purchase renter’s insurance through the app. Landlords have the option to pay $2.99/month/unit for faster payouts but this is not something that I use.
@Jake Burgdorf I have built a platform in Podio as business scales to include property management and project management. It started as a basic CRM that scrapes leads from Craigslist, receives leads from multiple marketing funnels and manages them via task management to the team members. Then the need for project management so I built a workspace to include a fix and flip workflow management and then finally property management that includes tenant communication, lease management and maintenance management. I incorporated stripe pay portal into the equation for rent payments and tracking.
@Stacey Bie I move each tenant lead into my CRM (FollowUp Boss) and tag them as “tenant” and with the zip code and price point they inquired about. If the person becomes one of my tenants then they get a different tag.
This allows me to reach out periodically (and simply) to check in and see if I can serve them in any way. This can lead to some good crossover with different parts of my business.