Efficiency: A Key To Successful Landlording

You likely acquired a rental property for financial freedom – to secure your retirement, to quit your stressful day job, to break free of whatever was weighing you down. Although you calculated the financial aspects of your investment to the penny, did you foresee the work you’d have to do managing the rentals? It can be overwhelming.

But there is a way to get your freedom back – it’s all about efficiency. Technology and internet-based services and software can give you the empowerment and autonomy that you expected when you first got into the landlord game.

How To Be An Efficient Landlord

In today’s always-online and highly technological world, there are many channels available to make your management tasks as efficient and productive as possible. Your tenants are online as much as everyone else, so it makes sense to become familiar with some of the ways your tenants may prefer to conduct their business with you.

Two important aspects of rental property management are keeping your tenants happy and maintaining good records. Happy tenants equal regular income, while detailed records help you keep track of your asset’s value.

No matter the size of your rental property portfolio, you want to organize its operation to keep accurate records and track its performance. At the very least you want to create detailed rent rolls that other potential investors can examine. You may not plan to sell, but you may want to leverage the portfolio financially or make some other disposition in the future. And if you plan to invest in more properties, you want an efficient management system that can scale up with new acquisitions.

Tools For Landlord Efficiency

Financial management: Consider setting up your rental property money-management in an online service such as QuickBooks Online or Xero. This will automate your financial management of the asset, offer you analysis on performance (broken down to individual units in a multifamily building, for example), and create rent-roll information for you.

Customer relationship management: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software can help you monitor and schedule dates, update work orders, and alert tenants about important dates when they’re approaching. That means if you need to show an apartment to new potential tenants, your CRM program will send out an automatic reminder message to your current tenant that their apartment is being shown. This same concept also applies to repairs, information about garbage and recycling, noise complaints, and other landlord-tenant interactions.

Good CRMs have mobile interfaces so you can work on your phone or tablet. You also want to make sure the CRM is compatible with your other systems so you don’t end up entering the same data twice. Finding the right CRM with your essentials can take time, but once it’s set up, it will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

Online rent payments: Use an online service or create your own portal to accept online rent payments. Send invoices, receipts and reminders by email. Offer online document signing (especially for lease renewals). The motto: Save everybody time, always.

Tenant screening: Choose your tenants with minimal effort using online tenant screening. For a modest charge you can check the background of potential tenants before you spend any more time with them.

Rent pricing: Keep your properties fully occupied and minimize vacancy by pricing your rents correctly in the market. Rentometer is a free online tool that gives you comparable rents in your area.

General productivity apps: Retool your phone and desktop with productivity apps, from scheduling to email and everything else that can trim time and effort from your landlord tasks. New apps and features are appearing all the time because everyone is interested in saving time and effort, working smarter and not harder. Some things I use: Slack, Calendy, Google Drive, and a password manager.

Online communities: Join professional online communities such as Bigger Pockets or private Facebook groups, where you can stay up with technology changes, and discuss best practices and tips for keeping your real estate assets performing optimally.

Freedom’s In The Air

There is a strong business case for being an efficient and organized landlord as the best way to safeguard your rental properties and optimize their performances. Time is the limiting factor, and efficiency through online tools is the answer – and tenants like it too. Best of all, though, you get you freedom back.