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Property management solutions (PMS) are tailored for running different properties by collecting their real-time information within a single system. However, custom property management software is also tasked to minimize the risks of unreliable tenants and enhance the relationships between tenants and landlords, helping them fix all the concerns and potential issues with property management companies promptly.
By this post, we would like to highlight the common difficulties that occur between landlords and tenants, based on Altamira’s experience working with clients from the real estate industry.
A custom real estate property management software is the perfect solution to all these property problems we figured out aiming to bring digital transformation to real estate. Keep reading to find out where and how to start the global automatization of your real estate business.
Common property management issues between tenants and landlords
We have collected the compilation of the 5 common issues with property management companies due to the lacking of a united software solution for real estate property management.
Lack of automation
All information and documents related to each property are stored in paper forms making them complicated to manage, save, structure, access quickly, change, delete, and the list can go on and on. When all papers are located in the head office, far away from the properties and real estate agents, the process of formalizing the rental or purchase contract can last forever.
Communication gaps
Based on our experience, the communication gaps between landlords and tenants (and sometimes real estate agents) remain one of the most urgent property problems in the property management process.
Due to the unavailability of a common system for all sides of these relations, landlords and tenants can contact only via mobile phone or email, which is not an efficient method as messages can be lost and calls can be missed owing to lack of spare time to talk or write back asap. This becomes an even more serious concern where the tenant request is urgent and requires quick alerting and reaction.
Absence of online payments
If property owners don’t use any of the market-available real estate platforms, then online payments become actually unavailable. One of the methods could be transmitting money from the tenant’s bank accountapp to the landlord card or account, typing the purpose of the payments.
However, the bills can be mixed up or lost as there is no single system where all data about financial operations could be stored and accessed at any time when needed.
Real-time property information
Along with property documents, landlords struggle with the absence of a single database to save all vital information including tenant content information, their requests and their status, real-time property information whether it is free or not, its cost, conditions, landlord content information, etc. To find out any piece of this information, landlords will have to call or write to the tenant to clarify each detail and favor, the same applies to tenants.
High turnover rate
There are cases when landlords cannot understand the high turnover rate within their properties, meaning why tenants move from their properties so quickly and what exactly doesn’t work for them. The high turnover rate is a result of the abovementioned property management issues, particularly lack of communication between landlords and tenants, long time processing the request and complaints with no visible results that show the careless attitude of landlords.
However, the issue can be related to unawareness of what is going on with their properties and tenants due to property management automation gaps.
A custom property management system is the perfect solution
Further, in this article, we would like to explore the benefits of the custom property management system and compare it to the market-available solutions. The real estate industry is on the brink of automating business processes with custom software implementations.
Some property management companies have already integrated their services with ready-made PMS, but do these systems satisfy all their needs and requirements? Let’s examine that question in detail.
Drawbacks of market-available PMS
Lots of property owners tend to use off-the-shelf real estate property management software to run their properties. Although, if the number of properties is increasing, then the ready-made solution may introduce some property problems and unsuitability to your real estate business.
We have researched the top property management apps on the market in order to determine what property management issues these ready systems cannot resolve.
Features of custom real estate property management software
The list of features depends on the real estate company’s specifics and needs. Therefore, we have collected the must-have functions each property management system needs to have the capacity to fix all issues that may occur between tenants and landlords.
Communication via real estate property management system
Real estate property management system enhances efficient communication between tenants and landlords, providing the ability to:
- Communicate via chat within the app
- Creating requests for tenants and alerting about them landlords
- Tracking request status without additional call or mail to landlords
Tracking of all financial operations
The property management system automates the financial operations by allowing tenants to add a credit card for automatic rent payment. All information about transactions and bills are collected and saved in the system to track the regularity of payments and check the data in cases of misunderstanding between tenants and landlords.
Data storage that is easy to access
Real estate property management software replaces all papers into digital data being stored within a single database that is accessible for all system users and can be easily updated, shared, or deleted.
It unites all company data including information about properties, tenant and landlords’ contact information, financial data, property inventory, and so on. The database access should entail multifactor user authentication, avoiding private data breaches.
Security system connection
A general real estate property management system can be connected with the security systems located on each property, connecting all access control devices due to IoT technology.
Along with data security, custom PMS software allows controlling the physical access to the buildings by tenants and visitorsguests using two-factor authorization with the access control technology hardware.
Tenant finder
The process of finding the tenant, considering all requests from the landlord, can last many weeks or months. The option of tenant finder can surf all actual announcements among the suitable tenants, providing the landlord with the list of the potential candidates.
Thus, landlords and real estate agents do not spend time and visit useless meetings, but agree on visits only for the tenants that match all the requirements.
Custom reporting
Custom reports commonly contain information about financial operations related to each property – rent pays, taxes, sales, and so on. You just add the filters you need at the moment to receive the report about the particular real estate object you own or manage.
Benefits of custom property management solution
As a conclusion of the above-mentioned points, we would like to familiarize you with the profits and privileges your real estate business can get by developing and using a custom property management system.
Automation of internal processes
Automation of the internal processes and the ability to integrate with other platforms save much time for landlords to find the tenants and easily communicate with them, as well as for real estate agents to see the real-time information about properties.
Improved tenant and landlord experience
Custom real estate property management solutions are capable of resolving all the abovementioned property management issues tenants and landlords face. The single system provides a seamless experience to tenants in chatting with landlords, sending and executing requestscomplaints, automated payments including rent and utility bills. The better experience they get, the lower the turnover rate the landlord will struggle with.
Constant customer support
Property management software systems can be integrated with chatbots and voice assistants to provide tenants with the ability to fix some issues any time of the day. Such online helpers support different languages, being always online to respond to customers’ requests.
Inspection templates
Real estate agents are tasked with inspecting properties before settlement and after the eviction of tenants in order to check the state of the property, its inventory, and detect the required repairs.
Using a property management system, the inspections become much quicker and more efficient as all property information is stored within the system database. And real estate managers just need to choose the available templates and add the fresh property information to automatically compare it with the previous version.
Why build custom PMS with our team?
Based on our monitoring of the real estate market and experience in building custom software solutions for the industry, we can surely say that the real estate area is diving into technology and digitalization. The purpose is to automate the processes within property management companies, providing a great experience for landlords and tenants as well.
Custom ERP development for real estate
The recent request from our client dealing with managing properties was the development of custom web and mobile property management applications for internal business use. The core problems that the company struggled with were:
- lack of automation in daily operations;
- lots of document errors made by humans;
- gaps in users notifications;
- lack of department connection.
The main purpose of developing custom real estate ERP was to provide a single database for all company departments to access and update real-time company information, enhancing automation of the processes related to different departments. The property management system consists of four types of solutions:
- Custom ERP for internal use;
- Tenant portal to communicate with landlords and real estate agents;
- Mobile application for internal and external use;
- Property finder up to tenant requirements.
To undertake the initially set goals of the custom ERP development for property management, Altamira rationalized the following dedicated team structure needed for building this type of custom business software::
- Business Analyst
- Project manager
- Solution architect
- Designers
- CSS
- DevOps
- Full-stack developers
- Flutter developers
- Quality control specialists
Property management software consists of several solutions and is supposed to be a complicated system to develop. Eventually, the project entails splitting the solutions’ releases into several stages, each of which can take from 6 months of development.
FAQ
To end up
Due to the development of technology and innovations, it would be a crime to use an outdated property management system with irrelevant functionality within your real estate company. Innovative custom PMS solution aims to drive the growth and scaling of your business becoming a competitive and recognized company on the market.
Our team is ready to provide you with the vision and precise plan for developing and implementing a highly functional custom property management solution into your real estate company.
