Five Ways to Improve Your Real Estate or Property Management Company

March 24, 2021

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Rent Manager

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Spring cleaning applies to more than just clearing out old junk. It’s a great time to examine where your operations and property can improve. Enhance your portfolio and spring ahead with these five helpful tips.

Refresh Your Look

Your property’s appearance is the first thing potential tenants notice about you, so make your first impression count. Start with the entrance of your property. Make sure this area is pristine and be watchful for common maintenance issues like broken or burned out lights, stained siding, or overflowing garbage cans.

A little landscaping can go a long way in creating a welcoming space. Routinely remove dead trees and branches, keep the lawn trimmed, and diligently remove weeds. Keep high-traffic areas—such as community mailboxes—clean and free of litter. Consider giving your office a fresh coat of paint and adding some new throw pillows to spruce up your furniture. Finish off your inviting space by offering snacks and freshly brewed coffee to all visitors.

Simple Steps to Improve Community Safety

Create a feeling of safety and security by taking steps to strengthen the perimeter of your property. Provide adequate lighting around the entire community, replace defective lights immediately, and make sure all locks and gates are intact and working. Remind residents to remove valuables from their vehicles, porches, or other easy-to-access spaces. If you live in a populated area, consider hiring a security guard to patrol the area at night if you or surrounding areas experience frequent issues.

Keep online security in mind as well. Include reminders about password management and alerts about local scams in your communications with residents.

Communication Is Key

Engagement is crucial to keeping your residents happy and informed. One easy way to increase engagement is to communicate with residents on the platforms they are most comfortable with. Send updates about rent, maintenance reminders, confirm outages, and more via text to your customers. Automate resident reminders about upcoming rent payments or leasing updates so they are always in-the-know with pre-scheduled emails.* For residents who are more comfortable with calling, make sure anyone who answers your phones has clear guidelines for serving your community. To provide 24-hour phone coverage, you can outsource after-hours calls to the Rent Manger Call Center, where a professional team will answer all calls following your property’s guidelines. By keeping residents informed about any upcoming changes, you can bolster confidence and improve residents’ perceptions—both of which are components that increase engagement.

Improve Your Connections

Creating connections goes beyond how you interact with tenants—how residents interact with each other, is also extremely important to your community. Create a poll* for your renters to take within their Tenant Web Access (TWA) portal to identify what kind of on-site events they are most interested in and solicit feedback to ensure your activities will be enjoyed by everyone. Events like trivia and decorating contents require little money, but can pay dividends in increasing community engagement.

Invest In Technology

Devote time into technology that automates your processes and provides your staff with the tools they need to succeed. Schedule Report Batches* to send vital information to your owners and automate accounts payable processes to minimize the repetitive work your staff does every month. Utilize templates* for frequently used documents to save your team the time and stress of inputting the same information over and over again. Work with an integrator to further tailor Rent Manager to fit your business needs. Make sure your staff is trained on new platform capabilities so they can get started saving their valuable time.

Now is the perfect time to review your business strategies and implement changes to improve your operation. A few small steps can make all the difference to your current and prospective renters.

*To learn more about these Rent Manager features, press the F1 key in your Rent Manager database to access the Help File.

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