5 Signs You’ve Outgrown Your Property Management Software
Property management software plays a vital role in your business operations. The important question is whether it’s actually doing enough.
Of course, few would deny that their workflows and oversight activities benefit dramatically from being able to oversee maintenance orders, interact with tenants and track resources online. Unfortunately, many fail to recognize that the software tools they use to achieve these actions fall short of the ideal. Here are a few simple signs you might be among the hundreds of companies using software that’s in dire need of an upgrade.
➀ You Can’t Manage All Your Properties
Unfortunately, property management toolsdon’t always keep pace with your firm’s expansion. In some cases, this manifests when you run up against limits on how many locations or units you can track simultaneously. In others, you’ll find that your software doesn’t accommodate the number of tenants or employee administrators that need to use the system.
Scalability is a must. Without it, your property management tools will hold you back as you’re trying to grow and overcome outmoded ways of doing business.
➁ You Can’t Implement Oversight on the Go
Being an effective property manager often means having your hands in many pots at once. It demands you be able to go from location to location to ensure your operations are running smoothly and attend to problems only you can solve. If your software doesn’t let you work from a mobile device with the same level of decision-making capability as you’d exercise in the office, it’s time for a major improvement.
Cloud-based property management software that keeps you mobile gives you more scheduling freedom. It also ensures that you’re never too far away from current information.
➂ You Lack Vital Analytics Capability
Many software suites provide a ton of data without helping you make sense of it. Others only offer rudimentary graphing and display functions, so you’re forced to spend time exporting the raw information into spreadsheets and analyzing it from there. As you expand, this kind of busy work becomes an increasingly large drag on your progress.
Your analysis process should never add to your workload. The software you use to gather data needs to automatically graph, chart or otherwise display said information based on the custom performance indicators you want to track. Failing that, it ought to automate the export process so that you can set things up once and reap the rewards of comprehensive oversight indefinitely. Without instant insights and effective tracking, it will be harder to save money.
➃ You’re Falling Behind on Compliance
Property management tools should help you implement standards and practices that foster effective compliance governance. For instance, if your state prohibits your employees from requesting certain information from tenants or mandates that they make special disclosures about your property’s construction, the software should include onboarding tools that make it easy to train staff members accordingly.
You ought to be able to know at a glance which of your units comply with various HUD, inspection or health rules and what you need to do to bring them in line. It’s also vital that your software stores associated documentation in an easily accessible format. Because these functionalities can impact your profitability, you may want to ditch any app that lacks them.
➄ You’re Not Filling Vacancies Fast Enough
The most obvious indicator that you need to step up your management game is that you’re constantly sitting on empty units. Whether your property-management app can’t track fine-grained marketing data or hampers your ability to communicate with employees and renters, you can’t survive without improving.