What parts of your processes and tasks are automated?

Question

I'm trying to automate and digitize more processes of managing long term and shortterm rentals.

Curious to learn what other landlords and STR listing owners are doing to automate day to day processes?

How much time are you saving by doing things more digitally and with more automation?

Thanks in advance

Ify (Bobby) Anizoba · Answer

I’ve made a conscious effort in automating and digitizing more of my rental management tasks and can share some of the tools I've been exploring that might be helpful to others.

I use Baselane a lot, it is a platform that's really geared towards landlords and real estate investors. It offers features like Automated rent collection (Tenants can set up auto-pay) and you can receive payments directly into your account without any manual tracking. Help with Expense tracking and categorization: You can sync your bank accounts and credit cards to automatically categorize expenses related to your properties. This feature and the financial reporting piece of it really saved my life!! You can generate reports on your cash flow and actually see how you’re doing. It also a property management piece built in with lease management functionality and maintenance requests. I have buddies that use stessa and avail but I use Baselane. The functionalities are kinda similar but baselane has more stuff built in so it’s easier to accomplish more within the platform. I’ve also heard of rent redi, but I’ll advice you look into each and you’ll see what I mean about the more complete platform.

Rachelle Antoine · Answer

currently using avail for taking payment and applications ( including backgrounds, eviction, rental history, history,etc); also allows for lease generation. There's more I want to automate myself!

Jillyan MacMorris · Answer

I’m an MTR/STR investor, so I use a pretty involved set of automations! I have used Avail for lease generation and applications, Turno for cleaning and inspections, Hospitabke for channel management, and Baselane for rent collection, banking and bookkeeping! In Baselane, I can categorize rental payments to distinguish between short- and mid-term rental payments automatically. My tech stack together has made the daily operations a lot tighter!

Alyssa Wright · Answer

So we only do it for vacant properties and for tenant-occupied properties, an agent always accompanies the prospectives through the home. We even made little signs to go up on the. door and on the kitchen to warn about fraud since it is more likely with self-guided showings. Right now, our rental listings are pretty centralized to the Pittsburgh area so everything is pretty close together!

I mainly handle the entirety of our leasing/marketing departments so since I'm able to cut the time I spend on showings in half, I'm finding a lot more time to reach out to new leads and form genuine connections with prospectives which really pays off when it's time to sign a lease!

I'd be happy to explain the process further as well or answer any other questions that you have!

Marc Oshiro · Answer

Because I have created a “hassle” situation for myself by going down the LLC rabbit hole I have separate LLCs and separate bank accounts. I use BASELANE for my banking type needs. Save me a lot of time by having everything integrated in one place. I can have separate bank accounts, debit cards, security deposit accounts etc. and now with new features like automatic recurring transfers things are even easier and time efficient

Drew Sygit · Answer

@Rachelle Antoine you'll want to be careful renting out your basement unless you have an egress that meets fire code. Typically you can get a window egress installed for $3k-5k.

Not aware of a Metro Detroit city that will allow the conversion of a SFR to 2-4 units in an R1 zoned area.- You can improve your search by only looking in R2+ zoned areas.- Will still be challenging to acquire a SFR at a low enough price to justify the cost of any conversion.

Regarding Michigan property taxes, we have a one-page explanation document we'll share if you DM us. - The challenge in Detroit is that the city is "deliberately" keeping SEVs low to not scare investors away over property tax increases. This is good news due to future increases in Taxable Values being capped:)

@Nicolas Munoz The City of Detroit offers many 2-4 unit properties, allowing an owner to live in one unit and rent out the rest. We've got many clients that buy them as pure rentals also. - The FHA 203(k) loan is a great way to buy a MFR as it allows repairs to be included in the purchase mortgage. Check it out!

Drew Sygit · Answer

Your automation metrics will depend on your scale.

It's one thing trying to automate for around 10 doors vs 700 doors.

Alyssa Wright · Answer

We use codeboxes for our vacant showings along with Appfolio. So it has almost completely automated the showing process for our vacant properties. As well as Appfolio will automatically confirm/cancel and follow up on showings.

It may not seem like a lot, but it really saves a lot of time to focus on other tasks/aspects!

Drew Sygit · Answer

@Rachelle Antoine so when are you buying your next rental?

Rachelle Antoine · Answer

yes it already had an Egress window! I am currently renting this unit. And it passed inspection with the city of detroit. I had my contractor pull permits!

As for property taxes thanks for the info! I just appealed mine and got it lowered earlier this year! I actually think the SEVs are not low in my area which is downtown/midtown/new center area. Many of my neighbors as well were over taxed. I learned from an info session Detroit uses a software to do the average SEV in the neighborhood which will be skewed in neighborhoods with a lot of gentrification. Plus, Detroit also has one of the highest property tax rates in the country! Luckily there are a lot of tax reduction programs like buying in NEZ zones etc.

What parts of your processes and tasks are automated?

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