When your rental property business grows, you may be debating the right time to add staff. However, as you grow your staff you also incur costs that can eat into your profits. The best strategy to maximize your rental income profit is to keep your property management team as lean as possible. But that’s easier said than done when everyone is working long hours to keep up with demand (especially these days, as we’ve seen a marked increase in leasing activity). So, is hiring another property manager actually the right solution?
Thinking About Hiring a Rental Property Manager? It’s Time to Consider Property Management Software
Take a Gut Check Before You Hire a Property Manager
Start by asking yourself these questions:
- Are my property managers spending their time on the most strategic activities?
- Are the phones ringing off the hook with unnecessary interruptions?
- Are all inquiries being replied to within the 1-2 minutes that Buildium recommends?
- Are my online listings bringing in qualified tenant leads?
- Are all of my online listings accurate and protected from fraud?
- Do I even know which advertising channels are publishing my listings?
- Have I been able to reduce my turnover rate?
- Have I been able to shorten the length of time that vacant properties sit empty?
- Am I sure that my lead vetting process is standardized and consistent, keeping me compliant with the Federal Fair Housing Act?
- Am I getting feedback from every showing?
- Do I have a way to waitlist and activate quality leads for future properties?
- Am I offering different showing options, including contactless showings?
- Do I have a way to identify and avoid known scammers?
- Are my team and I working more nights and weekends than we’d like?
- Have I used technology to streamline my leasing process?
- Am I sure that I’ll get positive ROI from hiring a property manager, once I account for the lost profit?
How do you feel about your responses?
There’s a good chance that your property managers (and possibly you, yourself) are spending a lot of time on low-value, repetitive tasks like sending applications, scheduling and rescheduling appointments, and reactively answering phone calls and emails. You’re all being interrupted constantly, which requires a ton of context switching to get “back in the groove” on whatever you were doing before the interruption.
As a result, you may be finding that the effort and investment being put in isn’t giving you back the ROI you want. And if you were unhappy with your answer to most of these questions, then hiring another property manager probably isn’t your best next step. Before you invest in more headcount, take the time to streamline your leasing process first.
The Question That Matters Most
You might just find that once you have the right tools in place and your processes are optimized, the staff you have is enough to keep your residential properties running seamlessly without cannibalizing your profit margin. So the real question you should be asking yourself is, what’s the value of being able to do the following things?
- Automate common repetitive tasks like sending applications after each showing or automatically replying to tenant lead emails and texts
- Use an online showing scheduler to let prospective tenants book and confirm (or reschedule) their own appointments, simplifying your showing process
- Offload up to 100% of your incoming leasing phone calls
- Measure the quality of all rental leads coming from your online listings
- Syndicate your online listings automatically across channels like Zillow and Facebook Marketplace, with no copy-paste errors or wasted time
- Track where your listings are published, and which channels are working best
- Use AI-driven anti-fraud detection to identify and blocklist scammers and hackers
Residential Property Management Software: The Solution You Need
Property management software helps your property managers get more done more quickly, while giving you key insights into how things are working and where you need to make changes. With the right automation solution, you will create efficiencies to save time and implement reporting to make your current staff more effective.
Tenant Turner scheduling software enables automated rental management that saves real time: 10-15 hours per property manager, every week. This is how you can free up your property managers to focus their time on more strategic priorities that will grow your business, while still making sure that you answer every prospective tenant as quickly as possible.
Tenant Turner has also been shown to reduce phone calls (also known as interruptions) by 70-90%, and even up to 100% with our leasing line call center.
The rental market has never been hotter or more competitive.
Now is the time to make sure your rental business is as optimized as possible.
