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Excellent property management involves more than simply placing trustworthy tenants in your rentals. It also involves operating your rentals efficiently enough to do all of the above and still have time to expand your business (or take the holiday you deserve).
The right tools enable you to accomplish the following:
- Rent collections (so you never have to track a late payment again)
- Utilizing software for maintenance requests (no longer acting as a middleman between tenants and contractors)
- Lease agreements (no more filing cabinets full of paperwork for e-signatures and digital storage)
In this guide, we will outline how technology solves some of your greatest challenges, apps to help you as a landlord, how to choose the right tools for your rentals, and much more.
How Technology Improves Property Management Efficiency
If you’re a landlord, you’re probably overwhelmed with repetitive tasks. But what if we could ease that burden with technology? Here’s how technology tools can help turn your daily grind from stressful to smooth:
Never Chase Late Rent Again
Nothing is more frustrating to the landlord than chasing down late rent payments. In the past, this meant awkward phone calls, consumer reminder letters, or beginning the eviction process.
Rent collection technology takes this stress away, completely. Services like Baselane, Avail, and Zillow Rental Manager allow tenants to have their rent automatically paid through their banks or via credit cards.
These services allow you to automatically remind tenants to pay rent, and also allow you to charge late fees as outlined in your lease agreement. The outcome is that you get paid consistently and without the uncomfortable conversations with late tenants.
Stop Playing Repairman
Today, maintenance management platforms like Buildium and AppFolio provide a way for tenants to submit a request for minor repairs using a mobile app complete with photos and descriptions.
You or your property manager can review the tenant’s requests, approve work that needs to be done, and dispatch a vetted vendor—all without picking up the phone. This creates an electronic paper trail, faster service, and your personal phone number isn’t being shared with every tenant and contractor.
You can perform maintenance obligations on time, fixing issues like plumbing that can negatively affect tenant health. Other repairs, if not done quickly, can spiral out of control, leading to even more expensive repairs.
Ditch the Paperwork Nightmare
Remember the days of huge filing cabinets overflowing with signed leases, repair invoices, and inspection reports? Property management software has all but eliminated the need for physical paperwork.
Cloud-based storage solutions such as Google Drive and Dropbox can provide secure online storage for every document. E-signature solutions like DocuSign allow tenants to sign leases digitally from any device. Need to pull up the lease from 2022 during an argument with a tenant? Easy, search digital records and pull them up in seconds.
Fill Vacancies Faster
Finding good tenants once required you to post the listing all over different platforms manually, then collect all of your applications from a pile of paper and filter through them that way. But with listing syndication tools, this is all changing.
Listing services, like RentRedi or Zillow Rental Manager, allow you to create one listing that is immediately published to Zillow, Trulia, HotPads, and other major rental listing sites. Also, the interested tenants are able to submit applications and even pay their screening fees, with all of their information nicely organized in one dashboard.
This way, you’ll have more applicants for your property in a shorter amount of time and reduce vacancy days. Plus, it eliminates the cumbersome work that comes with managing listings in multiple places or in your email thread.
Must-Have Tools & Apps for Property Managers
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There are many tools and apps for property managers that can help streamline tasks like rent collection, maintenance requests, and tenant communication. The following section explains the most effective property management applications for rent collection, maintenance, communication, leasing, and how each one streamlines your operations and reduces expenses.
Automated Rent Collection Platforms
The day of chasing rent checks down is over. Modern rent collection systems, like Baselane and Avail, are available, and they fully automate both the receipt of rent and the function of getting paid on time.
The tenant will still be able to set up recurring payments through their bank or credit card, and you will still receive automated notifications of asserting late fees and single charges allowed under your lease.
These systems also automatically keep detailed reports of payments and tax-ready income reports with no manual bookkeeping. They also provide you with immediate notification of payments received and, since most have periods for processing (like checks), and use third-party services to verify acceptance, you will receive notification in real-time to your bank and merged recordings.
Maintenance Management Solutions
Today’s apps, such as Buildium and AppFolio, have professional portals for maintenance requests where tenants submit requests for maintenance with pictures and/or videos directly from the app on mobile devices.
You will receive multiple organized work orders, approve them, assign them to reliable contractors, and track the completion of the work orders, all in the platform. This system will keep complete records of every single repair, which will also include invoices and before/after photos, which will serve to protect you in security deposit disputes or warranty claims.
You can also consider working with property managers alongside these tools. Professional property management in Northern Virginia can help streamline everything from lease agreements to property maintenance requests. This can make your investment even more profitable.
Landlord-Tenant Communication Tools
Protect your personal phone number and still be reachable. Dedicated channels of communication, such as RentRedi and HelloLand, have texting/email messaging systems created specifically for rental housing.
These channels keep all your tenant conversations organized in one searchable thread, including automated reminders to landlords and tenants for rent payments or lease renewals. Some include translation functions for bilingual communications, and others include document-sharing functions to send lease addendums and community notices.
By using these channels of communication, you maintain your professionalism and create a record you can refer back to if needed for legal reasons.
Digital Leasing and Document Management
We are no longer in an era of printing, signing, and scanning leases. There are many options for digitally leasing, such as Zillow Rental Manager and DotLoop. These applications provide complete digitized lease agreements, allowing potential tenants to electronically sign the appropriate documents, regardless of their device.
The applications securely retain executed leases, addendums, and any other important documents in cloud-based applications, employing ultra-secure methods on military-grade servers. Many of these services have task functions, customizable lease templates, and maintain their templates and task functions updated when legislative changes surface in the local jurisdiction.
Collectively, they provide the ability to onboard new tenants or renew leases from remotely or from wherever you are stationed, in an efficient and organized manner, cutting back on lost paperwork risks.
Listing Syndication Services
Finding good tenants begins with marketing. Listing syndication tools like RentRedi and Zillow Rental Manager will take the listing for your vacancy and syndicate it to dozens of the largest rental spaces, both local and national (Trulia, Zillow, HotPads, etc.), with a single submission.
Most have application processing systems that allow your prospective tenants to pay application fees and submit supporting documents directly from your listing. A few even have tenant screening tools with credit history and background checks.
Choosing the Right Digital Solutions for Your Properties
There are seemingly endless property tech tools to choose from, and choosing the right ones can feel overwhelming. Focus on property tech tools that meet your specific needs, regardless of whether it is for an owner/operator with two units or twenty.
These pro tips below will help you design and build an efficient tech stack without losing money or spending valuable time.
Here’s how:
- Find your pain points — Automate your biggest headaches (late on rent? maintenance calls?) before adding other tools.
- Use the free versions first — Most platforms (Zillow Rental Manager, Baselane) have great free tiers to test before upgrading.
- Verify mobile compatibility — Test apps on your phone, since you will likely need to manage properties on the go.
- Prioritize integrations — Applications that talk to each other (rent collection to accounting software) eliminate all the manual data entry.
- Sample peer reviews – Pay attention to reviews from landlords with similar portfolios and pain points.
Good technology should simplify your workflow, not complicate it. Focus on mastering 1–2 tools, then only expand when you need to with more tools as your business develops.
Conclusion
Rental property management shouldn’t be just about stacks of paperwork and returning maintenance requests at midnight. With the right technology—from automated rent collection to online digital lease tools—you have the tools for taking a chaotic workflow and turning it into an efficient and streamlined process.
Start with your worst pain points and find technology for those solutions. Once you have targeted solutions, you can start to create a tech stack that scales with your portfolio. Keep in mind your goal isn’t to use every app possible; it’s to choose the tools that will actually help you streamline your business processes.
Whether you have one rental property or manage multiple ones at the same time, adopting these innovations is only going to serve to protect your investment, keep tenants happy, and give you time to get back to what you want most to do.
