As a landlord, you’ve probably experienced the stress of having to run from one property to another to put out (hopefully figurative) fires. From plumbing issues to telling that tenant on the third floor for the 65th time that no, they can’t pile garbage on their balcony because it attracts flies, there are a lot of different situations that landlords have to deal with.
In between managing your existing tenants and making sure that they are happy and that everything in their apartments or condos is working properly, you also need to accept payments, attract new tenants, ensure common areas on your property are clean and maintained, and much more.
Managing all of this yourself, or in addition to staff, can make you wish that 5 p.m. and that bottle of wine you have waiting for you at home could be here right now.
Thankfully, we can harness the power of technology, namely a landlord property management app, to help make the job of being a landlord more organized and streamlined. You’ll get efficiency and productivity gains, but unfortunately, it won’t allow you to time travel (that bottle of wine will have to wait until 5 p.m. after all).
In this article, we explore more about the benefits of using a landlord property management app to manage your rental properties, and talk about the different types of applications that are out there.
What Is a Property Management App?
A landlord property management app is a piece of software that digitizes certain aspects of managing rental properties, from accepting payments to finding new tenants to managing staff schedules and tasks. Having this software available in application form is beneficial so that you can view information and make requests on the go right from your smartphone as well as your computer.
Main Features of a Rental Property Management App
The main features of a landlord property management app include:
1. Tasks and Checklists
Using your property management app, you can create daily, weekly, or monthly checklists of tasks that your staff needs to complete, including pre-arrival tasks for new tenants or standard maintenance checks, and assign them to a team member or a department to complete. You can also create ad-hoc tasks as they come up, and assign them accordingly.
For example, let’s say that you’re visiting one of your rental properties to conduct daily checks, but while you’re there, you receive a call from a tenant who lives at another property stating that their bathroom faucet is leaking. Using a property management app like Newbook, you can assign a task to the maintenance person at that complex to go over and check the tenant’s faucet without making an additional call. In addition, an email or SMS will be sent to the guest to confirm that the maintenance request has been made.
2. Automate Repeat Charges
Instead of having to manually consolidate charges from various areas, such as utilities, rent payments, late fees, and more for each tenant every month, a landlord property management app can do it automatically. This makes keeping track of financials for each tenant much easier.
For example, let’s say that a tenant didn’t pay their rent on time. Using an automation, the system can recognize that a payment wasn’t made by the deadline and automatically add a late fee onto the tenant’s account. At the same time, an SMS or email reminder can be sent to the tenant to inform them of the late fee and remind them that their payment is still due.
3. Online Self-Service Payments
Using a rental property management app, you can make it much easier and more convenient for your tenants to pay their monthly rent and other applicable fees with secure online payments. With Newbook, you can also set up more granular payment rules, like payment plans, direct debit, pre-authorization charges, and connections with online payment portals like PayPal and ZIP Pay. By making it easier for your tenants to pay, you’ll likely notice that you receive more payments on time.
4. Dynamic Pricing
Whether you own a short-term rental property like an Airbnb or an apartment complex where you do 6-month or yearly leases, dynamic pricing can be extremely beneficial in helping you determine probably the most difficult aspect of property management: setting prices.
Dynamic pricing uses an algorithm powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning to gather internal data and external market intelligence and use that information to set appropriate rates for your units, within your pre-set minimums and maximums.
5. Centralizes Operations
With a landlord property management app, all your business’s operations are centralized. This is important because having to move through different systems to find information and not have a single source of truth can be frustrating, lead to unnecessary errors, and affect efficiency and productivity. Features like daily summaries and scheduled reporting help you keep track of your business by feeding you the information you need at the frequency that you want.
Benefits Of Property Management App For Landlords
Using a landlord property management app makes your business operations more efficient and helps you and your staff to be more productive. At the same time, it reduces tedious administrative tasks through automation, saving you and your staff time. More specifically, by using a property management app, you can:
1. Save Time with Automations
Remember the example we used earlier about the tenant calling the landlord to report a leaky faucet, and the landlord requesting the maintenance person at that complex to go take a look, with the maintenance person receiving an automatic notification of their new task? One estimate says that property managers can save 30 hours a week by implementing automation. If that number seems like a lot, consider that could include multiple properties and staff members.
Other important tasks can be automated through an application like Newbook as well, like rent reminders, late fee notifications, missed payments, and lease renewals. Automating each of these ensures that communications are sent out promptly and eliminates the potential for you or your staff to forget to contact tenants. As you scale, implementing a landlord property management app and taking advantage of the automation functions becomes even more important for being able to do more with less.
2. Remote Management
When you have all the real-time information about your properties at your fingertips, it makes it a lot easier to stay organized and on top of what’s happening at each of your properties. Ever heard of the phrase, “A bird’s eye view”? That’s what your landlord property management app is giving you.
Being able to remotely adjust schedules, send messages to staff, and view granular information for each of your properties at a glance is important for being able to efficiently manage your rental business.
3. Better Financial Management
There are many moving parts when it comes to finances at rental properties. Some tenants may have late rent payments on their file, while others may have money owed to them from a deposit refund or a charge for a repair that wasn’t included in their rental contract. Managing the granular aspects of your business’s finances can be difficult without software to centralize and categorize financial information by tenant, property, or some other criteria.
By having a centralized property management app like Newbook, you can connect other applications to the system, like Quickbooks or Xero, but still maintain a single source of truth with your property management app. This allows you to manage more complex accounting like trust accounting while keeping data secure, organized, and accessible.
4. Savings in Operational Costs
Even though a landlord property management app will have monthly subscription costs, the return on investment often far exceeds what you’re paying for the application. The savings are often a wide variety of minor time and efficiency gains across your business’s operations that add up to big savings.
For example, consider how Newbook’s Key Café eliminates the need for a property manager to be present at a property when a new tenant arrives. Instead, the tenant can simply get their key to their new apartment or condo from a lockbox via a code that’s sent to them on their phone and immediately be able to access their apartment. If they show up early in the morning or mid-afternoon, it doesn’t matter because their key is waiting for them.
5. Data Security
Keeping sensitive information from tenants, like credit or debit cards, names and addresses, phone numbers, and more stored in spreadsheets, word documents, or paper files is just asking for a security breach. A property management app for landlords like Newbook comes with built-in online security to give you and your tenants peace of mind regarding data security. Security measures like SSL and TLS keep sensitive data secure while it is in transit or at rest.
Types of Apps for Apartment Management
Some apps for apartment management focus on one function, such as managing your listings with an OTA, while others incorporate the functionality of multiple pieces of software to provide an all-in-one solution, like Newbook.
The table below outlines the different apartment management app offerings that you can choose from:
| Apartment Management App Type | Function |
|---|---|
| Channel manager | Allows you to manage listings with multiple OTAs using one piece of software, including automatic price syncing and real-time updates for availability across all platforms. |
| Online rental property payment system | Gives tenants the opportunity to pay their rent or other fees online rather than having to write a check or visit the rental office. Some rental property management system offerings accept multiple forms of payment, like PayPal, credit card, or online debit. |
| All-in-one property management system | Includes all the features that you would expect in a comprehensive property management app, including: – Online payments – Centralized reservations and property management (manage multiple properties and tenants moving in/out with one system) – Built-in channel manager – Task and communications automation – Multi-property reporting – Comprehensive integrations and connections with popular applications |
| Revenue management system | Offers features that make managing revenue and setting prices easier and more effective, such as dynamic pricing, promotions, and commission management, as well as reporting and analytics to keep track of revenue-generating efforts. |
How Apps for Apartment Management Increase Revenue
As time goes on, property managers are faced with the problem of having to do more and more with less. Rates for rental properties continue to increase year over year in the United States due to a variety of factors, including market conditions utility costs, and increased cost of materials and parts needed for property maintenance. The average American spends 30% of their income on rent, but in some areas, the amount is higher.
Property managers are now put in a precarious position where they have to determine how to avoid constant rent increases while at the same time contend with increased costs. One of the ways that property managers can still see profitability increases even in uncertain times is by optimizing efficiency and productivity to its maximum potential.
A Landlord property management app can help with this by harnessing technology in ways that add efficiency to day-to-day processes. Here are some examples:
- Allowing tenants to pay their bills online rather than having to process individual checks saves time and money on banking fees and staffing costs.
- Automatic notifications and communications reduce the need to stay on top of late payments, outstanding fees, or other tenant matters.
- Automated task management makes it easier for staff to stay busy as they can action a task as soon as it’s assigned, or know which daily tasks need to be completed without additional direction.
- It helps increase exposure online by making listing with and managing multiple OTAs easier.
- Decrease staffing costs by allowing virtual arrival confirmations and giving the tenant the ability to retrieve keys from a lockbox, such as Newbook’s Key Café
- Centralized property management so that you can manage all of your properties, including operations, from a single view
How Newbook Increases Apartment Management Efficiency
Whether you’re managing multiple properties or just one, Newbook’s comprehensive property management system is an essential tool that you need in your property management toolbox. By offering multiple pieces of software in one system, such as channel management, revenue management, online payments, dynamic pricing, automations, and a robust integrations store, you can ensure that you’re getting the maximum use out of your property management system by streamlining processes and getting the information you need to make improvements where you need to.
Newbook also offers:
- Continuous customer support. When you purchase Newbook, you get white-glove customer support to make sure that you’re getting the maximum benefit that our software can offer your business.
- Collaborative focus. We view our customers like business partners, and are always willing to provide quick answers to inquiries and recommendations for process improvements that will benefit your business.
- An easy-to-use yet feature-rich system. Ease of use is an important part of Newbook. Systems that are difficult to use reduce employee productivity and buy-in, and add frustration in a business that already has its fair share. Simple, intuitive, yet effective software is what Newbook is all about.
In addition to these benefits, Newbook also offers a 99.99% uptime guarantee. Most software offerings highlight a 99% uptime guarantee, so how much difference does .99 make? Let’s break it down:
| 99% uptime | 99.99% uptime |
|---|---|
| 99% uptime equals a potential downtime of 14.4 minutes per day, 7 hours and 12 minutes per month, or 3 days, 15 hours, and 39 minutes per year. | 99.99% uptime equals a potential downtime of 8.64 seconds per day, 4 minutes and 19 seconds per month, and 52 minutes and 35 seconds per year. |
Taking Your Newbook Experience Further
Newbook offers a wide range of integrations that work to boost your experience with the software as well as augment your tech stack.
These integrations encompass a variety of software categories that are useful for landlords, including:
Payment Gateways
Giving your tenants a variety of options for paying rent, from direct POS to online, is essential to ensuring that rent is paid on time. Software integrations that support various payment gateways include:
- Newbook payments—an all-in-one payment solution that allows you to take payments via POS, online, or set up payment plans
- Bridgepay—allows you to set up automatic withdrawals from your tenant’s bank account (US only)
- BPay—Offers fast transaction processing
Revenue Management Tools
Effective revenue management is essential to track payments, keep your property’s pricing up-to-date with current market conditions, and help predict purchasing behaviour and demand. Different revenue management tools that are offered as out-of-the-box integrations with Newbook include:
- IDeaS—offers a comprehensive mix of revenue management tools that work for property managers with single or multiple properties
- PriceLabs—a popular option among apartment managers and vacation rental properties
Business Intelligence
Business intelligence tools are indispensable for leveraging data-driven insights, enabling informed decision-making across operations, policies, procedures, and beyond:
- Calumo—provides intelligent dashboards, reporting features, and forecasting tools tailored to your needs
- Qlik—utilizes in-memory processing and on-demand aggregations, Qlik empowers users to unearth profound insights from their data
- Tiger TMS—specializing in middleware for smart devices, Tiger TMS facilitates the extraction of intelligence from usage patterns, aiding in informed decision-making
Leverage Newbook’s integration partners to enhance your software experience. Additionally, if you require a connection not currently listed among our integration partners, we offer robust developer resources to assist you in building the necessary connections.
Conclusion
The challenges faced by landlords in managing multiple properties have been significantly eased by the advent of landlord property management apps. The benefits of these apps are multifaceted. They save substantial time and resources through automation, enabling property managers to handle tasks promptly and efficiently. The ability to manage properties remotely provides a bird’s eye view, ensuring organized and informed decision-making. Moreover, these apps enhance financial management, centralizing complex accounting tasks and ensuring data security.
Newbook, in particular, stands out as an all-in-one property management system, offering a robust suite of features, including:
- Channel management
- Revenue management
- Online payments
- Dynamic pricing
- Task automations
Newbook’s commitment to continuous customer support and easy-to-use interface make it a preferred choice among property managers who own one or more properties. Additionally, the 99.99% uptime guarantee exemplifies Newbook’s commitment to uninterrupted service, ensuring reliability and trustworthiness.
Book a Demo today, and let us show you how Newbook can be used to improve your business.
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