Finding new tenants during rental turnover is the most challenging and time-consuming part of a property manager’s job. With the average vacancy lasting thirty to forty days, it’s a major disruption to cash flow and annual income, plus the work involved to find and screen potential tenants is a significant effort.
Save Time with an Automated Property Management System
Property managers know that the ideal situation is a good quality tenant who pays their rent on time and stays for years. But sometimes turnover can’t be avoided. So when it happens, use leasing automation to streamline your property management processes as much as possible.
What Is Leasing Automation?
Leasing automation refers to the use of technology, typically property management software, to create leasing efficiencies and offload repetitive tasks. The time saved can be put towards more strategic priorities, like growing your business or strengthening relationships with existing tenants. At Tenant Turner, we’ve seen automation save property management companies up to fifteen hours a week, per person. That’s a lot of time that can be reinvested elsewhere in your business.
Leasing automation can help to streamline everything from advertising and attracting tenant leads to screening potential tenants for fit -- and beyond.
What Can Property Management Software Automate?
The right rental software solution will automate large parts of the leasing process. Let’s take a look at where it fits in the different stages of a typical lease process lifecycle.
Advertising
- Distribute your online listing across multiple listings sites, including your own website, without needing to re-enter or copy and paste data
- Protect your online listings from being hijacked with watermarks
- Track advertising performance by channel so you know what’s working
- Automatically respond to tenant lead phone calls and emails (remember, according to Buildium, you need to reply within one to two minutes to increase your chances of connecting by 40%)
Pro tip: For maximum visibility into your advertising performance, make sure that your tenant lead software integrates with the most popular online listings sites, including The Zillow Group, ApartmentList, Zumper, and Facebook Marketplace, to name just a few.
Tenant Screening
- Deliver standardized pre-qualification questions so you know immediately if a lead is qualified or not based on minimum requirements like income-to-rent ratio, pet ownership, move-in date and more
- Ensure consistency across every tenant screening
- Add custom questions to your pre-screening process to address any regional or local housing guidelines
- Use AI to verify tenant lead identifications and check them against a database of known scammers and squatters
Pro tip: To save even more time, look for tenant screening companies to fill the gaps that software can’t (think: compiling eviction reports, a full credit report, and more). One company that we trust for these types of screening services is RentPrep.
Showing & Leasing Process
- Use a tenant showing scheduler to let your prospective renters book their own appointments online
- Be notified when a potential tenant fails to confirm their showing appointment, so you can follow up and reduce no-shows
- Offer secure automated showings with an electronic lockbox -- there’s no need for tenant leads to come pick up a key from your office
- Deliver no-contact, fully interactive virtual showings that are easily tracked via the software
- Automatically send a rental application after each showing
- Put prospective tenants on a waitlist or keep them engaged for future properties
- Get full visibility of your entire rental portfolio and all tenant leads in one place
- Easily pull performance reports for yourself and for property owners
Pro tip: If you invest in an electronic lockbox, it can do more than just enable a lockbox showing. You can leave it installed once your new tenants have moved in, making it easier to bring in maintenance staff or trusted vendors as repairs are needed. You’ll be notified when anyone accesses the property with their secure code.
Anti-Fraud Features to Look For
The other key benefit of software is that it can help you avoid fraud, something that’s all too common in the rental market. According to CNBC, rental fraud incidents spiked by almost 50% while fraud warnings increased by 30%. This is all following a marked increase in the use of online tenant applications, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rental fraud is pervasive, and you need fraud detection software to protect yourself.
But not all software is created equally, so it’s helpful to know which features are most important. We’ve already touched on watermarks for online listings, ID verification and secure electronic lockboxes. But there’s even more that the right leasing automation software can help you do:
-
Risk Scoring: Identify scanners using algorithms that analyze dozens of data points (email, phone number, IP address, device ID and more) in real time
-
Post-event Monitoring: Track your tenant lead’s activity after an online transaction with you, to detect any new risks and revoke access if anything suspicious is found
-
Blocklisting: Block any prospective tenant who is found on a database of contact info and IDs known to be used by scammers
-
Take Requests: Scan for hijacked listings of your properties and automatically turn on a requirement for pre-approval of any request for a self showing for that property
-
Access Notifications: Be notified when an authorized tenant lead or trusted vendor arrives at your rental and requests an access code to an electronic lockbox
Find the Right Partner
If you’re looking for a tenant lead software solution that checks all of these boxes and more, it’s time to consider Tenant Turner. Our leasing automation solution saves time (remember: up to ten to fifteen hours a week) and reduces phone interruptions by 70-90%. And if you need help with our tools, our US-based support responds in less than five minutes during business hours.
Tenant Turner integrates with the biggest players in the online rental listings space. We also integrate with popular property management software solutions like Buildium, Rent Manager, Propertyware, Yardi, AppFolio and more, making it seamless to share your lead and tenant data across platforms. Our AI-powered anti-fraud detection is an industry leader, so you’ll have full confidence that both your rental property and your property management business will be protected from scams.
Here’s what one user, Valerie Wheat of Benefit National Property Management Inc. in Riverside County, CA, had to say:
“As a busy showing agent, Tenant Turner has changed my life!!! Scheduling is so easy and Tenant Turner always confirms my appointments and lets me know when someone has not confirmed. Tenant Turner is the perfect assistant, always working even when I am not.”
Ready to experience leasing automation for yourself?