5 Smart Ways to Manage Your Rentals While on the Move

If you have a real estate portfolio consisting of several rental properties, congratulations, you’re doing pretty well for yourself, financially speaking. While not just anybody can boast a portfolio of income generating assets, it’s not always sunshine and rainbows. From collecting monthly payments to coordinating maintenance, there are a lot of details to ensure that these rentals are properly managed for your financial benefit. If you’ve always been pretty hands-on with your rentals, you may be wondering if it’s possible to manage them without being physically present at the site.

The good news? Yes it’s indeed possible, but it’s not something that you can shoddily plan and expect guaranteed results. Remote rental management requires proper strategizing and resource allocation to ensure that everything runs smoothly while you’re away. If you’re on the lookout for ways to manage your rental while you’re busy moving around, then you’re in the right place. We’ll give you five useful insights and tips to help you keep your rental property operational despite your absence. Let’s jump right into it!

1. Hire a Property Manager

The first thing you must do is to hire a trustworthy property manager for each lot you own to watch over the place while you’re gone.  A property manager is useful as they essentially serve as the stewards of the place, performing a variety of functions to keep the place in good operational condition. In particular, a property manager does the following:

• They handle new tenant screening, inquiries, complaints, and communications on your behalf.
• They coordinate repairs, maintenance, and inspections with repair specialists, HVAC specialists, and inspectors.
• They collect rent in your stead, ensuring that it arrives in a timely and accurate manner.
• They uphold legal protocols on your property, ensuring that operations are legally sound.
• They market vacancies in your property, ensuring that the property is maximising its revenue streams.
• They ensure that tenants strictly comply with their lease agreements and enforce penalties for late or delayed payments.

In essence, a competent property manager acts as the manager in charge of your rental unit whenever you’re not around. Selecting a trustworthy one is essential to ensure that your property is under competent stewardship.  In vetting the best property manager, you can rest easy and focus on your activities outside the realm of property management and instead in other areas of your life. Some competencies to look for when choosing one are reliability, responsiveness, professionalism, and astute knowledge of local property laws.

2. Use POS Systems to Accept Payments in Building Units

If you’re managing a large apartment complex, a boarding house, or a multi-unit building, consider installing a POS system in an accessible part of the building—like the reception area—to facilitate payment collection.  A POS system allows tenants to pay their monthly rent and utility bills easily and at their own convenience. POS systems can be configured to accept multiple payment methods, like credit card, debit card, and eWallet-based payments. This flexibility is greatly appreciated by tenants who may have a preferred way of paying their bills.

A POS system is better than manual cash collection methods for a variety of other reasons. One of its primary benefits is its ability to automatically sync with accounting software, streamlining bookkeeping processes with accurate data entry and balancing.  Furthermore, POS systems also automatically generate receipts upon confirmation of a successful payment. This establishes a sense of legitimacy to your service and also protects you and your tenant by granting both of you verifiable and irrefutable proof of payment.

In essence, a POS system serves as a central payment processing terminal that your staff can use to process payments, even if you’re not around. You don’t need to physically be present to approve each payment, as each transaction is trackable internally. If you want to learn more about ways to accept money as a non-traditional business, click here to get more details. 

3. Install Smart Locks and Security Devices

If you can’t physically be on your property, then it’s essential to have security systems in place to ensure that your rental units are well-protected and under constant surveillance. A high level of security can be achieved through several means. The first one is by having a smart lock system in place. It can be a passcode or keycard system; either would work as they each have a great impact in keeping unwanted individuals away from your property.

Besides that, putting up CCTV cameras and smart doors can also be beneficial, allowing you to see events unfolding in real time or review past footage through Internet-connected devices. Smart doors also keep logs of entry and exit times, helping you keep track of property activity.

Besides smart security systems, having property-defending structures like fences and tinted windows can also be great deterrents for criminals and opportunists. These security measures help prevent crime and reduce financial losses by deterring intruders through constant surveillance and visible deterrents. Best of all, you don’t need to be on-site to get this done. These security systems send instant alerts, allowing you to monitor threats remotely in real time.

4. Automate Rent Collection Reminders With SMS

It can be tiresome manually reminding tenants about their upcoming payments at the end of each month. The stress can be amplified if you have to send it to multiple tenants at different times of the month through manual messaging via SMS.

Thankfully, you don’t have to do this repetitive task manually. There are SMS tools that can automate the process and send reminders to tenants about their upcoming rental schedule, as well as their current balance. And yes, these tools can be sent to multiple tenants at different times of the month.

Some excellent examples of these tools include SMSGlobal, Property Me, and Rentec Direct. These tools give you, as the landlord, the ability to message your tenants even if you’re not in the same area code as them with a reasonable charge. They also come with features like receipt tracking, reporting tools, and a comprehensive landlord dashboard. All you have to do is prepare a template, execute the delivery of the SMS at set times, and before you know it, you have a fully operational messaging system in the works. Simple as that!

Leverage Online Communication Tools

Whether you want to notify tenants of a rent increase or simply want to answer inquiries in your open listings, you’ll likely have to communicate with tenants and prospects every now and then. As this is the case, it’s important to have the right tools to support landlord and tenant communication. Thankfully, there’s no shortage of these messaging apps to help you connect with your tenants and property managers.

For one, apps like WhatsApp Business and Facebook Messenger continue to be excellent communication apps that can help you answer customer inquiries or contact specific individuals (or a group of individuals) at your discretion.

Conclusion

If you want to coordinate with your tenants in a more professional manner, property management platforms can house messages and rent records in a visual database. These systems allow landlords and property owners to know tenant status at a glance, making management easy and accessible through remote means.

We hope we’ve given you useful tips to help you manage your properties more easily while you’re not around. All the best in running your rental property business!