Automation vs. hands-on: where’s the sweet spot for small landlords?

[Parris Taylor]

If you only had 30 minutes a week to manage your rentals…

What’s the first thing you’d automate?

I’ve been building Kove and realizing most of my early landlord headaches came from overcomplicating everything—dashboards, spreadsheets, too many tools.

Now it’s just:

- One channel for tenants

- One place for repairs

- Simple reminders for leases + rent

What would you strip down or automate first?

[Peter Mckernan]

Quote from @Alex Melara:

I think a huge time constraint is vetting/confirming the legitimacy of prospective tenants. Seeing a lot of complaints about application cost and processing. 

@Parris Taylor

I agree with Alex, the time of getting vetted and doing that throughout the daily grind of everything else is a time suck. There are new vetting tools through some rental app software, but as in all things there are loopholes that people can fake and put the owner/agent/PM in a bad spot if they simple take that stuff for face value. For example there is a tool that send the boss/employer an email and they can check off that they are legit as an employee, but this can be a friend or random person the tenant knows putting the information down. Even this you need to vet, and call/email to verify. So, there still is a lot of time spent doing all these steps.