Contactless rental property showings are trending upward, especially during the pandemic. This is a trend that’s here to stay, even post-COVID. If your property management company hasn’t adopted self-showings as a preferred option, you’ll find it more and more difficult to compete with other properties and to fill your vacancies fast.
Prospective tenants prefer self showings, but they also deliver big benefits to property managers. Let’s take a look at a few of the benefits you can get out of contactless showings.
Related reading: Everything Property Managers Need to Know About Electronic Lockbox Self Showings
Save Time and Overhead Costs
Traditional rental showings can be painfully tedious and time consuming. Each appointment means you have to take time out of your day to drive across town just to open the door for someone. Especially now, during COVID, prospective tenants want to walk through the property on their own — which means you’re just standing around while they walk through the property. Then, after the showing, you have that drive time back across town again.
It gets even worse when you have a no-show. In that case, there’s nothing about the appointment that justifies the trip. It’s just a pure waste of time.
Contactless showings remove all of the overhead and free up your time for higher priorities. And if you’re using Tenant Turner software, you’ll have fewer no-shows as well — which can help get that unit filled faster.
Self Showings Are Safer
There’s no way to know for sure what’s waiting for you at an in-person showing. You’re taking a personal risk any time you meet a stranger at a vacant property, because you don’t know how many people will show up, or who they are. It’s just you, them, and an empty property. That’s why assaults on property managers are increasing.
Rental property showings can feel risky for prospective tenants, too. A single woman doesn’t know who will be waiting for her at the door, or what their intentions will be. These situations can be especially unnerving, because they’re going into a building, behind closed doors — and often during off-hours when it’s getting dark outside.
Contactless showings remove that risk, keeping you safe and healthy. Not only do you eliminate the opportunity for assault, you also avoid the chance of exposure to COVID and other health risks.
Eliminate Booking Conflicts
You can’t be in two places at once. Traditionally, if you have requests for two different properties on opposite sides of town, you have to say no to a prospective tenant. That could mean the loss of a lease. In fact, 40% of prospective tenants have passed up rentals because they couldn’t schedule a walkthrough visit.
Contactless showings let you book any number of walkthroughs at any given time. It also frees you up to be in person for a high-end showing Tuesday at 4:00, and also book your market rate property across town for a contactless showing at the same time. No muss, no fuss.
Related: 9 Must-Do Tips for Rental Property Showings That Seal the Deal
What About Self-showing Scams?
Contactless showings can be a popular target for bad actors who hijack listings from a property manager’s website. They market it with their own contact information and post it at half the rate.
These scammers create credibility for themselves by stealing the access codes to the properties — after all, who else would have the code besides the property manager? Prospective tenants go through a contactless showing that the bad actor set up, and afterwards the victims pay an application fee and first/last month’s rent.
That leaves you, as the actual property manager, with a squatter who believes they’ve signed a legitimate rental agreement. Now you have to evict someone, which can lead to police reports, bad reviews on social media, and even court costs.
This is a big concern throughout the rental industry, but not for Tenant Turner customers.
Tenant Turner has built-in fraud detection and prevention capabilities. Tenant Turner has a series of proprietary and third-party databases that actively monitor for suspicious activities across the Web. Advanced monitoring spots suspicious activity fast and shuts it down immediately so that bad actors can’t take advantage of your properties.
Boost Your Business with Contactless Showings
Contactless showings aren’t a silver bullet. For some properties, it makes more sense to stick with the in-person approach. But for most property managers, contactless showings bring big benefits for the vast majority of your vacancies. Richard Henry, owner of Druid City Properties sums it up best,
"We are able to manage 400 units with just 1 leasing manager. We love that applicants can view vacant properties 8am- 8pm 7 days a week. We lease properties faster with much less labor. Nothing better than getting online applications from applicants that you didn't ever need to speak with."