Investing in Portland real estate or thinking about buying a property?
Great idea, but you’ll find that this is an increasingly complex business. Rental prices, tenant selection processes, and legal requirements are always changing, making it difficult to stay on top of the latest trends and best practices.
This makes professional property management in Portland all the more necessary. It protects you and your property. More importantly, it allows you to leverage technology solutions that streamline the leasing, management, and maintenance operations your success depends on.
One of the best reasons to work with property managers is that we have access to the most innovative technology that’s available in the modern property management industry. While automation has had a significant impact on how property managers operate day-to-day activities, there is still much to explore in terms of understanding how technological advancements can continue to revolutionize each aspect of property management.
There’s also still an intense need for personal communication and contact. That’s another reason technology is so important to our business operations; it allows more time for relationships.
Let’s take a look at some of the best and most innovative technology solutions for property management, and how they help us do what we do more efficiently.
Streamline Rental Property Expenses to Save Time and Money
Our property management tech allows us to automate quite a bit, and that saves all of us time and money. There are a lot of established and developing technology and automation tools that streamline our processes and lead to lower costs. Here are some of the things we do to keep our management plans cost-effective:
Leverage cloud-based accounting software to automate financial management tasks like invoicing, expense tracking, and payroll. This saves us a lot of time on accounting and bookkeeping, and it also keeps all of your financials more accurate, detailed, and transparent. There’s less of a chance that we’ll detect any expensive errors.
Invest in project management tools whether we’re putting together a marketing plan, preventative maintenance plan, or move-out process. This allows us to optimize workflows, enhance collaboration, and eliminate inefficiencies. Less money is lost and less time is wasted fixing mistakes and catching up with tasks that are easy to put off or forget.
Easily track and report on business shifts as your portfolio grows. The value of your property and/or your portfolio is always increasing, and you need us to keep up with that. We utilize our tech and our expense reporting platforms to help you stay ahead of your finances and get a good understanding of where you’re spending the most money. As your business grows, so will your properties, your income streams, and your expenses. Your entire operation will begin to scale, and your accounting software has to keep up. As your expenses increase, the need for expense reports grows. Expense reporting is an important part of your operations because it not only tracks expenditures, it also helps you budget. Keep up with good expense reporting software. While it once had to be manual, you can now automate it.
There’s a lot of technology that we use specifically to streamline your business expenses and keep your operating budget lean.
Pricing Your Portland Home Accurately and Profitably
Technology solutions are required when it’s time to price your property. Rental values are always shifting, and establishing the right price for your property will impact how long it takes you to rent it and what sort of tenants you attract.
It also impacts how much you earn.
Pricing is one of the most important parts of the leasing process, and it requires good data. That data is easily found with the programs and property management software we have. Property management technology allows us to price your property more accurately and competitively without sacrificing what you earn.
A solid pricing strategy is part of your marketing process. It gives you a starting point for the recurring and consistent rental income you earn and it is also your baseline, influencing how much you can raise the rent during renewal times. It has to be right.
We know it seems easy enough to jump on Zillow and Craigslist to get a general idea of how much you can price your rental property for, but good data based on tech-driven sources is far more reliable. Technology helps us gather accurate data to make the right pricing recommendations. This ultimately leads to a better leasing process and a more profitable investment experience for you.
Innovative Marketing Solutions Streamline Applications, Showings, and Leasing
Technology has especially evolved when we talk about marketing.
We syndicate your listing, sharing your home for rent with dozens and even hundreds of rental sits. This saves a lot of time and streamlines the process of gathering attention to your rental home.
Not only can we share your listing across more platforms to get it in front of more potential residents, we can also gather important data that helps us to a better job of ultimately leasing the property. We can track the results of your listing, including how many people view it, contact us, schedule a showing, and fill out an application.
Technology has improved the showing process, the application process, and our ability to screen tenants. And don’t forget that at PropM, we’re willing to show your home for rent seven days a week. This is about responsiveness and customer service.
Our marketing solutions include dynamic video of your property that shows prospective tenants exactly how it looks inside and out, a sophisticated tracking system that can tell us when adjustments need to be made, more intuitive showings, fast tenant screening, and ultimately a lease agreement that can be reviewed and signed digitally.
Online Portals Streamline Communication with Portland Owners and Tenants
Tenants want to pay rent online. Owners want to look at their accounting statements electronically rather than waiting for a paper spreadsheet to arrive in the mail. Our ability to collect rent electronically and pay our owners through direct deposit streamlines the finances associated with your investments.
Online portals have been around for a while in property management. They’re growing more sophisticated and you’ll find them far more responsive to your needs. These portals help streamline communication. They also make it easier for you to access the information you need when you need it.
You can use your online portal to:
Review inspection reports.
Check how your vacant property is doing in terms of showings, applications, and marketing analytics.
Look at your financial statements and records for the month, quarter, or year.
Review lease agreements and renewal information.
Send a message to your property managers.
Communication is essential in good property management, and we use our technology to make it faster, easier, and more transparent.
Streamlining Maintenance with Innovative Property Management Technology
One of our best technology solutions is our ability to streamline maintenance by prioritizing work orders and separating work flows into emergency maintenance, routine maintenance, and preventative maintenance.
We’re managing a lot of properties for a lot of owners and investors. We want to make sure that every repair is managed efficiently and in a way that minimizes expenses and risk to your property. When we’re collecting all the information we need about maintenance and repairs in this consistent and streamlined way, we can take a look at the individual needs of each property and compare them to the other needs we’re juggling. We’ll know where we need to direct most of our time, attention, and resources right now.
Just because a repair isn’t an emergency doesn’t mean we’ll leave it unnoticed for days or weeks. We get to every repair request quickly, but we need to know where the major emergencies are and how to resolve them.
With our tech-driven process, we know what needs to get done. Prioritized lists help us organize work orders and keep track of them more efficiently and effectively.
When work orders come in, we sort them based on:
Urgency of need.
Team member or vendor who is likely to respond.
Location.
We get an immediate understanding of what’s needed, and we can respond to the most urgent requests first. Our technology provides us with a list of every work order that’s open, which prevents requests from falling through the cracks. We’re able to do this with our software management technology, which keeps us detailed, accurate, and transparent when it comes to the maintenance that’s needed and the maintenance we’re performing.
Our system automatically adds tenant requests to our maintenance dashboard, allowing us to assign work orders and respond to them right away. We can track the process and the progress right up until the point that each particular request is closed out.
There’s a lot of technology available, and part of good property management in Portland is understanding which solutions are ideal for the work we do and which are probably not necessary right away. We have some outstanding processes and systems in place. We choose tech that’s easily integrated and makes sense for our portfolio of investment properties and our owners who rely on us to make smart decisions.
Let’s talk more about how this can work for you. Please contact us at PropM, Inc.
