More than 60% of prospects read online reviews of buildings before deciding whether to sign a lease. What are your prospects reading about you?
If your team is drowning in emails every Monday morning or constantly playing phone tag to schedule showings, the reviews might be… iffy.
That can hurt your ability to rent units—even if your team is the best in the business. It’s hard to deliver the level of service you want when your team is bogged down by repetitive and time-consuming tasks.
Sure, you could hire—but then there go your margins.
If this sounds familiar, now is the time to consider some helpful automations that let property managers do more with lean teams.
Incorporating tech tools may seem counterintuitive when you’re looking to improve customer service, but letting technology handle tedious tasks can allow your current team to focus on more meaningful interactions with tenants and prospects.
Here are five essential automations that can help you level up your customer service without growing your headcount.
1. Zapier: Work Smarter, Not Harder
Zapier lets you link Tenant Turner to other software programs that you use to automate otherwise manual tasks.
• LeadSimple
• Salesforce and HubSpot
• FollowUp Boss
• Gmail
• Google and Microsoft Outlook calendars
We’ve heard from our customers how excited they are to connect Tenant Turner to their other software programs. Only two days after we announced the
Zapier integration, a dozen property managers had already created workflows to streamline tasks, like sending leads from Tenant Turner to LeadSimple.
2. Scheduling Automation: Free Up Your Team’s Time
Scheduling is one of those tasks that should be simple but can snowball into a big project if you’re playing phone tag, have prospects with limited availability, or are short-staffed on agents. Luckily, it’s also one of the easiest tasks to automate.
Plus, prospects appreciate self-scheduling. It lets them conveniently schedule a showing while they’re browsing Zillow or another listings website.
Prospects are probably looking at more properties than just yours. If they have trouble scheduling a showing with you, they might move on to the next property. Self-scheduling prevents frustrating back-and-forth communication.
Self-scheduling also ensures that prospects receive the same prompt scheduling service whether they discover your unit during business hours, late nights, or weekends.
A better customer experience isn’t the only benefit of self-scheduling. It also saves your team lots of administrative time.
Ben Parham, president at Integrity Realty and Management, explains how self-scheduling has benefited his team: "Tenant Turner has streamlined the showing scheduling process to an extent that our leasing team gained an entire work day per week back that they previously were spending scheduling showings.”
Make scheduling even easier by connecting Tenant Turner to your Google or Microsoft Office 365 calendar to help schedule showings around existing appointments and avoid double-booking yourself.
3. Self-Showings: Offer Convenience to Prospects and Save Your Team Time
Self-showings are one of our customers’ favorite features. They not only save your team tons of time, but they also provide much appreciated flexibility for prospects.
With self-showings, you don’t have to add more agents to show more units. And prospects aren’t subject to your team’s availability. They’re able to see a property when it’s convenient for them.
The first step in a self-showing is often pre-qualification questions. These can be sent automatically to an interested prospect. They let you weed out anyone who may be a poor fit based on the rental requirements. You can even customize the questions to make them applicable for your property.
Results Property Management discovered the time-saving benefits of automated pre-qualification. The team used Tenant Turner’s pre-qualification feature to weed out unqualified applicants and avoid showing them units they wouldn’t be able to rent. As a result, the team halved the time it spent on leasing.
Once a prospect passes the qualification process and schedules their showing, an electronic lockbox lets them access the unit without an agent present. Tenant Turner provides a unique, one-time code for the lockbox so prospects can enter only once to view the unit.
To summarize: Self-showing reduces the amount of time your team spends showing units, and it makes the showing experience more convenient for prospects. It’s a win-win.
4. Automatic Communication: Never Miss a Follow-Up
On busy days, it’s easy to miss an opportunity for proactive follow-up with a prospect. But that follow-up can make a big difference in whether they decide to apply for the unit.
Instead of manually sending follow-up messages, use Tenant Turner to send an automatic text or email after a prospect has viewed a unit, asking for feedback.
You can customize your automatic follow-up even further by setting up a Zapier integration with your email client. Thank the prospect for touring and recap information about the unit that they might want to have handy while making a rental decision. Include the application link, so they can apply for the unit right away.
Automating communication takes one more task off your team’s to-do list while keeping the prospect moving through the rental process.
5. Generative AI: Solve Writer’s Block
If you’re ever at a loss for words, generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, can help. Use AI tools to draft property listings and prospect communication.
Input the details for a unit into ChatGPT or another generative AI tool and ask it to write a listing description. Use a prompt like this one:
Write a property listing for an apartment with these details: 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, 1,000 square feet, fourth floor, hardwood floors throughout, spacious balcony, on a quiet street near City Park.
You can even ask AI to format the listing for a specific website, like Zillow or Craigslist.
You can also use ChatGPT to create email templates that make communicating with prospects easy. Try a prompt like this one:
Write a follow-up email to a prospective renter after a showing, asking if they have any questions and sharing a link to an application form.
Keep in mind that, while AI tools are improving every day, they still make mistakes. Review everything they write to make sure it’s clear and accurate before you post or send it.
Using AI tools can make writing tasks easier, which means you can respond to prospects faster and with less effort.
Bonus: Use Leasing Line to Answer Scheduling Questions
In addition to these tech tools and automations, another way to free up your team’s time is by using our Live Answer leasing line. Our Live
Answer team is available to assist prospects with scheduling showings and addressing self-showing access issues, even on nights and weekends.
Take advantage of Live Answer to remove these repetitive calls from your team’s plate while ensuring that prospects are still able to get their questions answered quickly.
Automation Helps You Give Better Service with a Lean Team
Over 80% of people rate an immediate response as “important” or “very important” when they have a sales question. If your team is too swamped to meet those expectations, it might be costing your business.
Automation changes that. A prospect could find your unit on Friday night, schedule a self-showing for Saturday, and apply on Sunday. By Monday, you’ve secured a tenant for that unit with no extra effort.
Automation can help you deliver faster, more consistent service. If you’re interested in seeing Tenant Turner’s automation in action,
schedule a demo.