Our Top Tips for Efficient Property Management

If you own or manage multifamily communities, you know that efficiency and good processes can make or break you.

From managing maintenance requests to collecting rent, processes can be the difference between 97% and thriving or 60% and struggling.

Before we get into our top tips, let's go over a few more benefits to running a tight ship.

Why Efficiency is Important for Multifamily Pros

When it comes to property management, the goal of efficiency is to do more with less. Faster and better processes lead to a healthy asset.

Most importantly, taking the time to build this infrastructure will make it easy for you to expand your portfolio, with fewer growing pains.

That being said, let’s dive into the top strategies for efficiency in property management.

Our Top Tips For Multifamily Property Management Businesses

Stay Organized

One of the best tips for improving the efficiency of your property management business is to stay organized.

This means keeping detailed records of all your transactions, maintaining clear and consistent communication with tenants, and regularly reviewing your processes to identify areas for improvement. By staying organized, you'll be able to quickly and easily access the information you need, reducing the amount of time you spend on administrative tasks.

Tip💡: Make a list of reports or information you need to share often. At the end of the month, look for ways to automate or organize this information so that you spend less time searching for it.

Building Strong Relationships

In addition to staying organized, it's also important to focus on building strong relationships with your vendors.

As a property management company, you can’t do it all. Business services like marketing, IT, landscaping, and more can’t all be done in house.

Your vendors are an important part of your business plan, make sure to build genuine relationships with them. It will pay dividends in the future and prevent headaches.

When you need to make a vendor call, you want them to prioritize your business.

Creating Systems for Maintenance

Finally, it's important to be proactive when it comes to maintenance.

This means regularly inspecting the property, addressing any maintenance issues quickly, and taking steps to prevent issues from the get go.

Tip 💡: Send out surveys to all residents monthly or quarterly. These are a great way to discover maintenance issues before they get worse.

Best Technologies To Maximize Your Multifamily Business

Your tech stack can be the difference between having a well-organized and efficient operation, versus one that is crumbling due to lack of structure and processes.

Let’s highlight some of the best technologies you should consider using.

Smart-Home Devices

There are a number of smart-home technologies that can help with the physical management of your community.

For example, smart thermostats can allow you to remotely control the temperature in individual units, saving energy and making it easier to respond to tenant requests. Automatic lights and locks can also make it easier to manage access to the property (less door-opening for you) and reduce energy consumption.

Virtual Tours

Technologies like virtual tours and video conferencing can be useful for showing properties to potential tenants without the need for in-person visits.

This can save time and make it easier for you to manage the rental process, particularly in cases where potential tenants are located far from the property.

Truth 💣: Virtual tours make physical tours faster since the prospect already has a great sense of what the property is like. Shorter tours means you can fit more into one day.

Property Management Software

This one is BIG, we know.

The property management software you select will have a massive impact on your ability to reach occupancy goals, put out fires, and run an efficient operation.

When selecting a property management software, ask the following questions to make sure it’s a good fit:

- How does this software reduce in-person interactions?

- How do you integrate with my current tech stack?

- How do you make the following day-to-day processes easier? (i.e. Maintenance requests, rental applications)

- How does reporting work in your system? (We all know, reporting is a massive part of property management. It should be easy, since you will use it all the time)

Truth 💣: Don’t make the mistake of focusing just on features when selecting a new PM Software partner. Try and understand how this new software will change your workflows and make your day-to-day easier.

DoorLoop

Today’s post is sponsored by DoorLoop.

DoorLoop is a robust all-in-one property management solution built to perfectly handle the needs of multifamily properties.

Ease of use, simple and straightforward design, and great documentation to help you get started, combined with a deep feature set to give you everything you could want in a property management tool.

Building Blocks subscribers can take advantage of 50% off your first two months of DoorLoop.

Features include:

• Automated rent collection with multiple convenient payment options
• Full-featured CRM with tenant portal that makes communicating and working with your tenants easier than ever
• Marketing tools such as automatic listings
• Leasing tools, including digital eLeasing, tenant screening, and more
• Accounting suite purpose-built for property management, including everything from a full chart of accounts to bank reconciliations
• A complete maintenance management system that allows tenants to create maintenance requests that get sent straight to the app. Plus, send orders to vendors, pay your vendors, and communicate with tenants all from one central location
• And more

If you’d like to learn more, head over to their website at DoorLoop.com.

‍

‍