The COVID pandemic really hasn’t done most businesses any favors. Property managers, managing both retail, commercial, living, industrial or any other properties were very uncertain about the future of their business. This raised some alarms and forced business owners and decision-makers to look for measures and ways to optimize the way they do business and reduce operational costs as well as increase profit margins, where possible. One of the tools helping property managers do business post-pandemic are property analytics tools and more specifically – different sorts of property management program products. Let’s look at how digital software tools help with the optimization of property management. 

Minimize the risk of the unexpected

A lot of the time, property managers have to deal with unexpected maintenance work as well as other issues that might come up without any previous announcement. These issues are, however, usually related to the lack of maintenance or monitoring. But, the lack of monitoring isn’t always just poor management. Sometimes there just aren’t enough human resources or suitable tech tools available to keep track of everything. Luckily, software tools like SOFT4RealEstate can solve this. It’s a one-stop and one-size-fits-all tool that has capabilities to store data, relevant to maintenance and notify about upcoming jobs and tasks.

Within the SOFT4RealEstate interface, users can create a recurring maintenance schedule. Ranging from assets inspection, elevator checks, pipe inspections and many more different tasks, all can be grouped and sorted within the program. This makes managing so much easier because you’ll never miss and your tenants won’t ever miss an important job to prolong the service of both infrastructure and frequently used technology.

A property management program only works well if it’s user-friendly

Too often businesses get hung up on and get stuck with mediocre software solutions that aren’t able to meet the expectations and demands of your users. The main problem is usually centered around lackluster user-interface which doesn’t offer convenience for first-time users or even hardened veterans, who will need a lot of time to do even basic day-to day tasks.

SOFT4RealEstate, for example, is created on the all-familiar Microsoft Dynamics platform, which has a very familiar feel, similar to that of other MS Office apps like Excel, Word and others. This sort of user-friendliness will result in quicker integration of newer management employees as well as significant reduction in the time it takes to complete one or another task, whether it be a simple change of schedule or a complete audit of ongoing contracts.

Areas like property reporting become much more straightforward if the interface is easy to get your head around. If your personnel are able to generate reports, charts and graphs with a few clicks, you save numerous hours which would otherwise be spent on designing and making those very same visual sources of information which would be very relevant to higher management and shareholders as well.

Communicate with tenants more efficiently

Yet another area where a lot of managers struggle to gain benefits is communication between tenants and building managers. Real estate program for property management should be able to do at least a few things in that regard, either opening a direct line of communication via newsletter management or by having an embedded self-service portal where tenants can read any relevant notifications about their situation. The portal allows tenants to find out contract details, request maintenance or see their payment history, etc.

Instead of being bombarded with requests to provide certain documentation for your tenants on-demand, you can always rely on your self-service portal to handle it and relieve some of the load that your administrative staff has to carry.

Save time

The most precious resource in business is time. Regardless of how much money you have on hand or how many people are working on the job, having enough time (or more of it) is what truly matters. So, save time and reduce time expenses in any way you can. A tool for property management is a great way to start. With easy-to-use property analytics tools and straightforward and expansive property reporting features, your office will be able to reduce time expenditures by at least a few hours per week. Imagine if you convert that to cash. 

Case studies and other users’ experiences have shown that property management software can help save up to 10 or even more hours each week, resulting in more efficient workflow as well as elimination of some mundane tasks from your agenda and/or schedule.

Manage contracts and other documents in one place

The legal side of property management causes more than enough challenges for your staff. Ranging from GMP management, GDPR compliancy, renewing contracts with tenants on time and other legal areas of managing a property is an area where you can benefit from having versatile software in use.

To begin with, dedicated programs will be able to store information about leads and monitor their status. Thus, sales people can update the status of a lead in the system and transfer the duties to the legal department in order to prepare a contract. However, with the right software, there isn’t a necessity to use a legal officer because you’re able to generate contracts based on previously used templates. 

There are also graphical and very extensive reports on sales performance, monetary income, etc. Besides, you will save numerous hours because your staff won’t be needed to generate invoices and catalog them anymore. Most real estate software tools have a built-in feature that allows to create invoices and manage bills with a few clicks. We’ll take it a notch further. If the tool is really cutting-edge, you can automatically generate invoices in a PDF format and send it directly via email or upload it to the self-service portal for the tenant to access.