One of our most popular blogs is a high-level overview of The Lifecycle of a Property Under Management. In that blog, we discuss new deals processes, property management processes, and relists through the traditional method of property management.
We want to revisit this topic through the lens of property management process automation as a lot has happened since we first posted on this topic in 2018.
At that time, Geekly Media also worked in property management consulting and training. We helped many property management companies improve their operations and create training programs for new hires. We decided there had to be a better way to run a property management company that would reduce work and increase overall financial success. It was then that our property management operating system (PMOS) platform was born.
So, how does the property management lifecycle change when you add process automation? Let's take a look at the New Deals stage.
The property lifecycle starts with the new deal stage—and with a new lead. Whether through inbound marketing, paid ads, or outbound marketing efforts such as radio ads or cold calling, your marketing team acquires new property management leads.
That lead should then populate into your CRM if your team is set up to use marketing process automation, or they will manually have to create a new deal in your CRM.
Perfectly adjusted marketing automation should then move that lead through your team's sales pipeline based on the triggers that you set. An example sales pipeline would look like this:
This is still a part of the sales pipeline! After your sales team gets a verbal commitment from your lead, it is time to send your property management agreement to them to make it official.
Sales and new owner onboarding process automations can continue to assist your business development team.
Before your staff starts working on the make-ready, you'll want your marketing team to get the property listed and on the market as quickly as possible to build a pool of potential renters that are ready to lease when the property is open for viewing.
Use automations to trigger checklists that your property management team can use to ensure that every task is being completed on time and to your specific property management workflows for leasing.
Let marketing automation alert your tenant prospect list that a new and interesting property is getting ready to generate interest the very same day!
Another chance for automation to shine is the Make-ready Process. Let automations keep your new owners in the loop (and request that great review from a thrilled client) while you let your automations send off tickets to each person responsible for a property's turn.
Your team can also use built-in reporting to always know how quickly they successfully turn a property, which parts of the process are bottlenecks, and where you should consider your next hire.
With finely-tuned marketing automation targeting great tenants that are looking for a rental, you'll be ahead of the competition in the area with a lower days-to-lease average than your competitors.
Using automation will allow your team to track average time on the market for the properties under your care, so you can keep ahead of trends and continue to give accurate data to owners that want to work with your company.
By hitting the time frames your sales team talks about, you'll set yourself up for customer satisfaction—and hopefully, some great referral business!
Your team can use automations for the lease drafting process, just like they can for the sales and new owner onboarding process! Automate the sending and receiving of the lease documents and get owner approval with just a few clicks.
The process automations supporting your team will cooperate with your property management software, so they have complete data in both systems. This helps your team to quickly process the new file, and then move to the property management phase of the property lifecycle (we'll cover this in our next blog).
Just how much time and money can process automation save you? Download our case study on the power of automation to see what we did for a major player in the industry!