Cloud-based Rental Property Management Software

The booming rental property industry is hungry for solutions that enable the optimization of property management operations. According to the statistics, the property management industry average annual growth rate for the last 5 years has been 2.5%, gaining a bigger market share every year. Property managers are increasingly concerned about growth and owner satisfaction. More than 70% of property managers perform property inspections, advertise vacancies, deal with property management ticketing systems, facilitate leases and seek instruments that will help them automatize all these business operations.

In this article, we will discuss the overall definition and features of cloud-based rental property management software, discuss the main technical and budgeting aspects as well as define why to choose custom-built cloud rental property management software.

What is cloud-based rental property management software?

Cloud-based rental property management software is a tech tool designed for managers, landlords, operators, enabling them to attract leads, fill vacancies, manage leases, and screen potential tenants. The real estate industry relies mostly on customer (tenant) experience. 

There exist various types of cloud rental property management software systems for different purposes and end-users:

Cloud rental property management software provides centralization and automation of data operation, modernizing business processes, putting the tenant front and center. It positively impacts the bottom line resulting in financial success for anyone who invests in cloud-based rental property management software (PMS), optimizing tenant management, accounting, tasks, and landlord responsibilities.

Architecture and must-have functionality of PMS, KPIs that matter for property managers

Modern web-based rental property management software typically combines different working environments into a unified center based on a cloud platform. The combination of functions and modules depends on the type and size of the property in question that is under management, however, the main ones include:

Main KPIs that matter for rental property management software in cloud

Based on practical experience, Altamira experts have gathered the main KPIs that should be taken into account by anyone looking to use rental property management cloud software.

• Understanding the pain points of tenants and elevating their satisfaction levels through the implementation of cutting edge functionality.
• Tenant retention rate. The cost of losing a tenant is three times higher than renewing a lease.
• Certificate of insurance compliance.
• Efficiency across properties. Automatically submitted orders, visitor access pre-clearance and management productivity. 
• Work order completion rate is paramount to effectiveness of your service delivery model.
• Efficient response to incidents keeps financial losses to a minimum.
• Inspection completion rate. 
• Cope with the most challenging parts of management, automate mundane tasks, documents, speed up the most important functions and KPIs.

Architecture 

The choice of architecture is a serious tech consideration, since it directly influences the future flexibility of your app and the possibility to scale up and expand its functionality going forward. 

Features

Cloud-based rental property management software gives the ability to easily export data from any module, generate accurate reports and easily access any business insight needed for smooth functioning of business workflows.

The real value of cloud-based rental property management software for your business

Cloud rental property management software allows automatizing the entire process of marketing, renting, and maintaining rental property. Efficient management of inspection notes, tenant requests, and tasks saves time, costs, and provides considerable benefits for your business:

• Increased cost-efficiency. Cloud based rental property management software allows cutting costs on maintenance, upgrades, and data storage. Tenant acquisition and rent payments can be performed online.
• Transparency and accessibility. Have instant access to all the significant business insights at any time from any spot having everything in the palm of your hand.
• Increased productivity through easier collaboration.
• Highest level of privacy and security. Frequent audits of the security levels, as well as data encryption and multilayered authentication, guarantee the highest level of security.
• Improved customer experience. It is achieved by cloth interactions, unique user experience.
• Efficient administrative part. Easy management of requests for maintenance and repairs.
• Easy scalability and ability to expand the existing functionality in accordance with the need of your growing business.

Landlords and any stakeholder using rental property management cloud software will get a considerable advantage having all the key insights laid out in detail in a single platform and easily accessible. Incorporating a custom software solution into the daily operations will completely change the way you manage your property.

How the implementation of cloud rental property management software will increase your revenues:

• Take profitable business decisions based on real-time reporting. Data transparency allows more accurate forecasting and in-time decision-making, informed pricing strategies and right marketing decisions.
• Implement more responsive pricing strategies in reaction to the most up-to-date  existing demand. It will allow maximizing sales.
• Personalize the stay of your tenants using the generated data insights allowing to grow the return rates.
• Reduce the administrative load through online distribution channel integration and save time on inventory management.
• Increase the occupancy rates and decrease downtime.
• Create a unified portal for your tenants and easily review the property performance.
• Automatize the repetitive business tasks, such as property vacancy posting, billing, inquiry response management, while concentrating on more important aspects of the business.
• Reduce time spent on billing thanks to the integration of online payments, enhanced with automatic reminders and e-mail notifications.

Challenges that may arise

Some complications may arise while integrating the cloud-based rental property management software into your business operations. Here are the most widespread ones:

• Complex architecture and interface
• Incompatibility with the existing management system, causing data import and data export challenges
• Limited functionality. The app could be irrelevant with ever-changing business environment 
• Poor security shield. Web-based rental property management software in the cloud usually contains sensitive private data and should be secured and protected with multilayered authentication and data encryption.
• Choice of the wrong tech stack. It can’t be stressed enough how important it is to choose the right up-to-date tech stack to be in-step with the rapidly changing tech environment.

However, these major challenges with cloud-based real estate software solutions could be overcome with the support of an advanced development team.

How to find and hire a property management development team

Primarily, a CTO or a property manager looking for solutions enabling quick business digitalization should understand that there are two ways to get the web-based property management software – select one of the ready-made solutions available on the market or opt for a custom-built one. Custom rental property management software in the cloud offers the highest degree of flexibility and will directly support the needs and objectives of your business. It also means scalability, high performance, easy integration of all the necessary APIs, and unique interactive designs.

Choosing ready-made cloud-based rental property management software is a good alternative, however, getting the necessary tech support to integrate the web-based property management software into your existing business ecosystem can be a challenge. Moreover, it always has limited functionality and creates additional expenses for subscription and maintenance.

If you decided to hire a team of developers and launch a custom cloud rental property management software development you need to take into account several factors when choosing your software development partner:

• Client reviews and Industry domain expertise
• Availability of successful cases to serve as proof of quality
• Transparency of processes
• Ability to control the project flow
• Availability of all obligatory specialists in the tech team including Business Analysts, Designers, Specialized Developers, QA specialists, etc.

Scale-up proposition for your business from Altamira

Altamira has a full team of experts that are always ready to provide custom web-based property management software development. Our custom solutions are built in a way that provisions integrating the needed third-party tools into your business environment and existing tools, adapting for specific business operations. You can grow and scale up easily simply by expanding the functionality of your software in accordance with ongoing business needs.

You can either rely on your in-house development capabilities (if you have such employees) or hire a dedicated development team and launch the development process to digitize your business and enhance the existing business operations.

The development of cloud-based rental property management software is a challenging task. There exist a number of points that always need to be taken into account upon such development:

1. Choice of the right architecture

It depends on the specific business struggles as well as the potential for future scaling. Through evaluation of the existing IT infrastructure it is possible to build the best suitable architecture strategy to meet individual business objectives.

1. Functionality planning 

Well-organized project management allows splitting the development process into an optimal number of iterations to implement all the features required and provide productive performance at each stage of real estate software development. Here are the functions that ought to be incorporated:

• Better capacity through efficient data-based decision-making.
• Rental payment automation. It will allow the processing of various types of payments ranging from direct deposits to credit card transactions.
• Tenant billing automation. Billing rates, monthly payments, personal charges can all be tuned and generated automatically thanks to template customization.
• Finance and lease tracking. Capture all the tenant details, ensure that everything managed is clear and precise.
• Reporting. Adjust and efficiently manage the reporting with specific dimensions and metrics in accordance with the stakeholder’s priorities.

How much does it cost to hire a dedicated team of specialists?

We offer agile, affordable cloud-based rental property management software with transparent pricing and no hidden fees. However, the real cost of a dedicated team for your projects depends on several factors:

• Model of cooperation you choose
• Set of features you need
• Tech requirements

On average the cost of development starts at 50k USD monthly. The development timeframes may vary from 4 to 6 months.

The discovery stage is one of the most time-consuming phases due to the advanced analytics and goal-setting efforts involved. The cost ranges from 6,000$ to 8,000$.

The wireframing stage costs up to 7,500$.

The UX/UI design stage that aims to increase the product’s accessibility and usability as well as overall user satisfaction from the solution may cost starting from 7,000$.

The most costly stage is front and back-end development. In general, this clearly vital step may set you back up to 145,000$.

Why hire developers from Altamira for custom app development

Focusing on the needs of the customer and the existing local market demands, we respond to the latest tech and business trends. Being in business for over a decade, we have secured a 93% customer retention rate thanks to the advanced skills of our experts and full dedication. We are ready to quickly build new solutions from scratch but are also open to modifying existing systems to enable you to be up-to-date with the current trends.

We provide cloud rental property management software solutions that enable you to find and check for potential tenants, respond to their maintenance requests, and account for all the accruing expenses and underlying revenues.
Our clients choose us since we guarantee:

• Security. Help you work securely from the cloud that the whole world has been transitioning to, data storage-wise. We offer secure and robust cloud infrastructure built on Azure that allows our apps to offer the highest level of privacy and keep your sensitive data safe.
• Cloud-based SaaS and mobile solutions are easily integrated with the existing business systems with the customized tech stack.
• Discovery stage. Our BA’s will analyze all the aspects defining the individual business objectives and analyzing the market niche. It allows introducing a needed and competitive product to the market.
• MVP development. Get the prototype of your idea with the most important features included with the fastest release. Get the opportunity to test the product on the market and get customers’ feedback.

Our software product development company will help make your property management smart, enabling you to easily track payments and expenses among other features, the inclusion of many of which is up to you. Highly intuitive interface, ongoing support and maintenance, regular data backups and multi-layered authentication, high performance and unique set of features and the full list of characteristics of app functionality we develop does not even end there.

Our success stories

Props tech – a cloud-based rental property management solution

A customer came to us with a request to digitize the property renting process and streamline the workflow by improving the maintenance, request management, issues solving, payments automation, and tenant-landlord communication.  Advanced Altamira team have delivered a location-based phone repair solution connecting experienced verified technicians working from home with customers in the local area. The software allows improving the management of the key business processes, simplified the tenant-landlord issues, automated the rental process for tenants, property owners, and real estate managers.
The software assist in:

• Keeping all the important business data is a safe single database;
• Successful rental property management;
• Quick and efficient request management;
• Online payments;
• Enables efficient communication between tenants, landlords, and property managers.

To sum up

No matter the kind of property and number of objects you manage, you have to deal with a variety of challenges. Vacancies, turnover rates, tenant-related issues, maintenance requests, and many other pain points pose challenges for property managers on a regular basis that may seem difficult or tedious to humans, but not automated computer systems. Property management software is an all-in-one solution allowing you to get rid of major property management headaches, protect your reputation and grow profits thanks to advanced tech capabilities and opportunities for prosperity that they create.

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