When you add up your tenant vacancy costs, you’re likely thinking of lost rental income, which is easy to quantify -- you know exactly how much potential revenue you’re missing. You probably also automatically count in any mortgage payments or HOA fees that you’ll need to continue to pay even though the property isn’t earning any income.
Those are hard costs that are easy to see.
But what about hidden vacancy costs -- the ones that are much harder to tally up, yet are a significant drain on your business?
Some additional costs you need to consider include utility payments, cleaning expenses, and repairs or maintenance costs. All in all, the average cost of turning over a single rental unit ranges from $1,000 - $5,000 -- and that’s before factoring in the lost rental property income itself.
But perhaps the most significant cost in terms of impact and value is the hardest one to assign a number: your time.
What’s a property manager to do?
Tenant scheduling software is the solution.
You’ll automate the tasks you do most often, increase efficiency, speed up the rental turnover process and significantly reduce costs associated with your rental vacancies. The right software creates efficiencies across every step of the process and allows residential property management teams to deliver a better leasing experience.
That means that in addition to reducing costs, it can lower your tenant turnover rate by giving you more time to focus on showing properties and getting leases signed.
More than half of all rental properties turnover each year, so there’s a need to find quality tenant leads on an ongoing basis. But lead generation is time-consuming, with lots of manual data entry and re-entry to create, post and advertise listings. Then, there’s a constant stream of interruptions in the form of phone calls, emails and text messages that force you to break your focus.
Add to that the fact that you need to answer potential tenant leads before your competition does -- and you need to be much faster than you may think. Buildium recommends that you respond to potential tenants in just 1-2 minutes.
Without automation on your side, that’s nearly impossible.
Then, manually qualifying all those leads takes a lot of time, and can be hard to do consistently. You may get so distracted by qualifying bad leads that you lose the best ones to other properties. Tenant Turner scheduling software helps with every step of the tenant lead process:
Easily advertise listings to popular advertising channels like Zillow, Zumper and Facebook Marketplace, as well as your own website, to eliminate slow and error-prone data re-entry.
Once you’ve got a good tenant lead on the line, you need to schedule a showing and hopefully get a signed lease. Traditionally, that takes a lot of manual effort from property managers and their teams; you have to schedule appointments, follow up with confirmations, and hope that the potential tenants actually show up. Then, there’s the time it takes to hold the showing. And in today’s contactless world, more and more people may be hesitant to attend an in-person showing as it is.
Tenant Turner scheduling software lets you streamline this process while offering your tenant leads convenient showing options. They can choose what’s best for them, improving their leasing experience. You’ll also reduce the risk of no-shows and increase your chances of getting to the signing:
Software ensures that you’re spending your time on the best tenant leads, and gives you the highest chance of converting them into actual tenants. By automating common tasks, you’ll speed up the turnover process and make the time to run more showings and focus on your business, reducing your vacancy rate.