The Simple Guide to Effective Enterprise Property Management

Congratulations on becoming a multiple property owner! But while the process of acquiring more than one property is a challenge in and of itself, managing more than one property comes with challenges of its own.

Securing trustworthy and hard-working staff is the first and most important step for effective enterprise property management. These individuals are the key to ensuring that your campground, RV park, vacation rentals, or apartment complexes are running smoothly at all times. 

But your staff must be properly guided on where to apply their skills and abilities. Guests checking in and out, repairs and maintenance, cleaning, setting room or site prices, and marketing initiatives represent just a small handful of daily tasks that must be completed for each property. Having a singular point of reference to look at that organizes information and tasks for each property is a must—not only for you but for your staff as well. 

That’s where enterprise property management software (enterprise PMS) comes in. Whether you’re managing two or dozens of properties with hundreds of units each, this software solution helps keep everything organized so you can understand what’s happening at each of your properties at a glance. 

What Is Enterprise Property Management?

Imagine you and your staff are sitting up in a watchtower looking down at the world below. But instead of the ground, you see an interactive map of all your properties, with little icons moving around like a board game indicating events happening in real-time. When something needs your or your staff’s attention, it can be dealt with quickly because everyone can always see what they need to do. 

For example, when the power goes out at one of your sites, your maintenance team for that property can handle it immediately—because the software has sent out an automatic notification that a breaker was tripped in a certain area and needs to be reset. If your enterprise PMS is integrated with software like Wild Energy, you can even do simple resets right from the software without having to go onsite. 

That “interactive map” is your enterprise property management rentals software—a specialized digital tool that allows you and your employees to prepare for and respond to the daily comings and goings of all the different properties that you own or manage. 

Standout features of enterprise property management rental tools include:

• Centralized operations—You and your employees can easily access information and tasks, so daily operations can take place seamlessly, and staff productivity can be increased.
• Booking chart—Check-ins, check-outs, individual and group bookings, promo codes, automatic discounts, invoicing, and more for each of your properties can be easily managed with enterprise property management software.
• Housekeeping—Knowing where and when to clean a unit or check a site is important, but incorporating housekeeping functionality does more than notify when cleaning needs to be done. It can also automate task assignments to the right people (e.g., daily cleaning schedules) complete with checklists. 
• Time tracking—Understanding how long it takes to complete certain tasks makes it easier to adjust schedules and set expectations for employees and guests (e.g., setting check-in times that allow staff enough time for cleaning).
• Automated communication—Messages to guests, including pre and post-stay emails and SMS, can be sent out to inform and engage with guests without lifting a finger.
• Revenue and rate management—Manually setting room or site prices for multiple properties is unsustainable. Look for enterprise property management software with dynamic pricing to handle it for you. 
• OTA and channel management—Allows you to manage listings with different online travel agencies and other listing channels for each of your properties from one location.
• Reporting and analytics—Getting objective data that gives insights into your business is priceless for helping you make effective business decisions. Enterprise property management software can deliver these insights straight to your inbox. 
• Marketing tools—Keeping in contact with your guests and securing more bookings is essential for your business. Enterprise property management software also provides performance insights so you can track how well these communications are doing. 

Why You Need Enterprise Property Management Software

Seamlessly managing your multiple properties using software that provides a single source of truth for you and your employees is essential. Otherwise, isolated systems and processes limit collaboration and result in inconsistent management across your different properties. Providing the same level of customer service to guests and a consistent employee experience across all your business locations is essential for success. 

Can you imagine if you went to a McDonald’s in a different city and ordered your usual 10-piece nugget meal that comes with two dipping sauces, only to find out that this other restaurant charges you extra for the second sauce when the one you go to all the time in your city doesn’t? It’s a minor example, but discrepancies make for a negative customer experience, especially when expectations have been previously developed due to past experiences. 

Property management software aims to help you unify experiences and processes across your different business locations so that you can provide that consistent experience across the board. Being able to do so goes a long way in establishing trust with your target customers and your employees. 

Benefits of Software for Enterprise Property Management Rentals

The main benefit of enterprise property management software is the centralization of management tasks and information for multiple properties. However, there are other benefits to implementing this software into your daily workflow.

1. Eliminating Tedious Manual Tasks So You Can Spend More Time Driving New Business

For every business, time is money. If you can get a computer to take over tedious manual tasks, like notifications and task scheduling, that’s a big win in terms of time savings. Depending on your enterprise property management solution, the time savings resulting from business automation can be in multiple areas. 

With Newbook, here are some examples of how automation helps you streamline your business operations:

• Automatic size selection helps repeat guests easily book their campsite. Previously entered information about the size of their RV is saved, as well as their preferred site size, so the right sites are presented to them from the get-go. 
• Automatic invoicing takes away the need to remember to bill long-term guests, as an invoice will be sent out automatically on the date you set. Newbook also handles payments and gives your guest a receipt for their purchase.
• Automated task management means that notifications and tasks are created when certain events occur to ensure that things get done properly. For example, when a guest finishes booking, an automated task is scheduled for a departure room clean and a pre-arrival check. If a guest has a special request they’d like handled before their arrival, that can be included in their pre-arrival check so that staff knows what to do before the guest arrives.

2. Better Handling of Guest Messaging and Communications

From confirmation emails to reminders regarding check-in or check-out,  effective enterprise property management means being able to communicate with your guests quickly and efficiently and with the right information at the right time. Automated messaging can handle a lot of the heavy lifting to ensure your guests have the information they need to enjoy their stay fully. 

Plus, sending guests additional important information, like campsite safety guidelines or appropriate attire to wear at the water park, can also be sent using automated messaging. 

A notable way enterprise property management software has been used to communicate with guests was through Tathra Beachside’s business. This holiday park was faced with a situation that’s unfortunately affecting more and more areas of the world these days, extreme weather events. 

Thankfully, the owners of Tathra, Carmen, and Tim, could use Newbook to locate, communicate with, and help evacuate every guest on their property—all from a remote office they set up. This ingenious use of property management software has since been praised by emergency specialists, showcasing once again just how important it is to have a mass communications channel for your guests at your fingertips.

3. Managing Booking Channels and OTAs

Every property manager knows that online travel agencies and other booking channels are essential for driving business, but it’s often more lucrative to list with multiple channels rather than focusing on just one. 

But diversifying OTAs also means managing more listings, which means keeping track of calendars with available properties, incoming reservations, and guest communications from each platform. Keeping on top of these various channels for one property can be a full-time job in and of itself, but multiple properties can quickly become overwhelming. After all, if even one channel is overlooked, guest communications can be missed, and rooms or sites could end up double-booked.

Being able to integrate all listings in one location is an essential feature that enterprise property management software like Newbook provides. This way, you can easily see any communications and action items from multiple channels in one place. With Newbook, integrated channel management comes standard with the software.

4. Save Money

Enterprise property management software is an investment that pays for itself in dividends. From streamlining certain business processes from bookings to customer communications to providing dynamic pricing capabilities to set the best prices for your rentals, you’ll be able to do more with less when you invest in an enterprise property management solution like Newbook. 

5. Enhance the Guest Experience

Being able to provide a seamless experience for your guests, no matter which one of your properties they stay at, is important. Effective enterprise property management software integrates and streamlines multiple essential business functions to manage them from start to finish from one location. From automated communications to allowing guests to easily make changes and upgrades to their experience from a guest portal, Newbook has everything you need to drive new and repeat business.

What to Look For in Enterprise Property Management Software

Before you purchase the first enterprise property management software that shows up in a Google search, it’s important to read reviews and ensure that the software you’re looking at has the functionality you want. There are hundreds of offerings on the market, and every single one is trying to earn your business by highlighting their unique selling points.

Knowing what to look for when you’re purchasing any software is important. Here are some important considerations that you should keep in mind while you’re making your decision:

Considerations for Enterprise Property Management Software	Why It’s Important
1. Ease of Use	– Software with straightforward navigation and setup is often easier to onboard. – Easy-to-use software increases employee buy-in. – Software that is easy to set up and use means a more seamless transition to new and improved workflows.
2. Features Vs. Benefits (to you)	– More features don’t always mean easier or better. Ensuring you match each feature with a benefit to your business (e.g., centralized hotel OTA management) helps you stay focused on what matters most. – Make a list of pain points that your business experiences so that you can match features and benefits to those pain points effectively. Prioritize each pain point to know what needs to be solved and what is nice to have.
3. Onboarding Time	– Onboarding for enterprise property management solutions is usually included in the subscription price or offered at an additional cost. If onboarding costs extra, it’s usually because it’s a more involved process that considers your unique business needs.  – An onboarding plan should also be provided. Most enterprise property management software providers will give you an estimated onboarding time, a list of milestones, and the time it usually takes to meet them.
4. Dashboard Customization	– When you’re dealing with multiple properties and staff members, the ability to customize what information your dashboards show you is essential.  – Dashboards should be customizable at a global and individual level so important information is available for every type of employee at a glance
5. Scalability	– As you add, remove, or change employee positions, your software should be flexible enough to support user access levels and permissions changes. – Similarly, if you purchase another property, an effective enterprise property management solution should make setting up a new property (or integrating information from another system) straightforward.
6. Integrations Support	– Every business uses multiple different pieces of software, like an email client, word processor, video conferencing software, and more. Ensuring that your enterprise property management solution can integrate with the software you use daily is essential. – Integrations are sometimes handled via an applications “storefront” with compatible apps or through an API that facilitates custom connections using code.

Increasing Revenue with Enterprise Property Management Software

Enterprise property management solutions increase revenue for your business in two different ways:

1. Operations-level improvements and streamlined processes lead to savings in regard to the cost of doing business.
2. Dynamic pricing initiatives via the revenue management side of the software help you earn more by setting the right price for the right guest at the right time, making upselling easier, and helping to reduce empty rentable areas on all your properties.

Efficiency improvements can be minor or major, but they all translate into cost savings. For instance, paperless check-in through Newbook means that you don’t have to pay for paper and ink to print check-in documents, and in many cases, you don’t even need to have a front desk person available at every single property to facilitate guest check-ins, they can just do it themselves via the guest portal.

On the other hand, dynamic pricing considers the following to set prices accordingly:

• Patterns and trends with customer purchasing behavior
• Factors that influence those patterns and trends, like weather, economic conditions, location, political climate, and more
• Current promotions and discounts

By combining efficiency with effective price setting, you can not only get a leg up on your competition, but also positively impact your bottom line, and provide a better guest experience. 

How to Use Enterprise Property Management Software Effectively

Sticking to a schedule when managing multiple properties is not always easy.  Inevitably, multiple fires will pop up, prompting you to take action. But by taking advantage of the time-savings that enterprise property management software offers, you can at least free up your schedule to deal with the inevitable emergency that pops up.

Here are some tips for using enterprise property management software to help you save time:

1. Take advantage of automation. From keeping in touch with guests to scheduling important tasks for your employees, the functionality of automation in enterprise property management tools should not be overlooked. Eliminating as many manual tasks as possible helps reduce human error and puts more time into your daily schedule. 
2. Encourage employees and stakeholders to set custom dashboard views. Newbook shows global dashboards but allows individual employees to set their own view in addition to the global dashboard on the main page. This helps employees keep track of tasks, performance, and more at a glance.
3. Integrate, Integrate, Integrate. Your tech stack is more than just a way to execute work, it also provides valuable data that your enterprise property management system can help manage between different software applications. Integrating as many daily software tools as possible ensures that your enterprise PMS acts as the central core of your business.

How Newbook Can Help With Enterprise Property Management

By centralizing all the aspects of your property management and revenue management operations, Newbook helps accommodation providers manage each of the services and staff they have for multiple properties in one location. This means that instead of needing to switch back and forth between software, all information for all properties is available in one centralized view that’s completely customizable.

In addition, Newbook is one of the few enterprise property management solutions that offer a one-stop shop for integrations with popular applications and OTAs. By simplifying and integrating a tool you use daily, connections are more reliable, and you can maintain centralized operations through streamlined information transfer. 

Plus, Newbook boasts higher uptime compared to competitors at 99.99% versus 99%. That looks like pretty much the same reliability on paper, but that extra .99% is important. Let’s take a look at what it really means:

Reliability Rating	Potential Outage Time
99%	3 days, 15 hours, and 39 minutes annually
99.99%	52 minutes and 35 seconds annually

Would you rather have to deal with fewer than an hour of downtime per year or three whole days? It’s much easier to rectify one hour of lost business compared to over 80 hours. 

Conclusion 

When it comes to effective enterprise property management, it’s essential to incorporate a centralized management solution so you can keep a bird’s eye view of your locations without physically having to be there. After all, this isn’t Harry Potter, and you don’t have access to a Time Turner, so the next best thing is being able to manage all of your properties using one piece of software.

If you’re looking for enterprise property management rentals that will cover all your bases when it comes to revenue and operations, look no further than Newbook. 

Get in touch with us today for a demo or any questions you have about our software.