Online Property Management Tools for Life After COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic will have long-lasting effects on how many businesses operate. Property management companies are no exception.

In this article, we'll show you the best online property management tools to manage your portfolio in this new normal.

Why Do You Need Online Property Management Tools?

Most people have adapted to a life where you can easily access most commodities with a mouse click. Property management must take a giant leap in the same direction. By modernizing your business and transferring to new online tools, you can provide your current and future tenants, owners, or investors with the convenience they need.

As a straightforward example, vacant apartments receive a lot of traffic from prospective tenants who wish to rent them.

As such, they present a real risk of transmitting the virus or other sicknesses between people. This makes most prospective tenants unwilling to view the apartments in person.

If you're a landlord, you might be wondering how to adapt to these challenging circumstances. With new online management options, many have turned to companies that have proven themselves able to innovate. This helps keep a low vacancy rate and manage profits, all from a safe spot behind a computer screen.

If you don't keep up with new technology, you might find yourself short on new tenants willing to rent your units. In this respect, the previously traditional methods lack the necessary scope to reach a broad audience.

If you're a property manager, you need to get acquainted with the options available and utilize them to maximize profits and keep your vacancy rates as low as possible.

Online property management tools allow you to keep everything in check and make sure all the gears are turning. Plus, you have the added benefit of being easily accessible at all times.

Chat Bots

If you're a landlord or property management company, it's vital to get the best feedback from your customers as quickly as possible. Making a chatbot is a simple way to automate feedback gathering and provide your customers instant response times from a trusted source.

Chatbots such as Drift Bot, Intercom Bots, or Zendesk Bots will make real-time responses the new norm for your website.

When you have a chatbot, the most common customer inquiries will be automatically processed, and the relevant data sent to your team directly. Using a bot avoids the need to go back and forth in emails to understand the issue.

Furthermore, unlike human team members, chatbots are operational 24/7. You can let them manage your site and provide the first contact with a potential customer for you.

Online Tour Scheduling

One of the most important aspects of renting a vacant apartment is scheduling tours. In such a new environment, online tours have become the de facto method of potential tenants viewing their prospective homes for the first time.

However, traditional methods can prove too cumbersome to streamline the process efficiently. Keeping schedules of the tours you need to conduct can become a real nightmare if you have scores of potential tenants you're willing to meet.

To solve the problem, you can turn to online scheduling services.

Calendly will handle all of the cross-scheduling for you. Using it will allow your prospective tenants to pick a slot for an online tour quickly.

Calendly will keep your schedule updated whenever a new tour is arranged, so you won't accidentally double-book. It can even remind the attendees that their tour is about to begin.

Acuity works on a similar principle, handling your schedule so that customers can pick a slot that works best for them. Using an online scheduling manager saves you time setting up time slots and rechecking availability.

If you're looking for a more personalized approach to scheduling tours and managing your leads, why not consider an AI manager like MeetElise. This sophisticated AI leasing assistant will work alongside your team to make sure customers get instant responses to their most pressing questions. Elise will also keep in touch with any prospective tenants, allowing you to spend less time drafting emails.

Property Models & Floor Plans

If you're an apartment owner these days, 2D pictures of the floor plan are just not enough. As there are countless options available on the property market, you need to grab your prospective tenants' attention with detailed models of your property. The tenants don't need to imagine how the space looks if there's a high-quality 3D model on their screen.

GenMarketing is one of the leading 3D design agencies that solely focuses on property and apartment modeling. Signing up with them allows you to get a working model of your apartment to show off to potential tenants.

GenMarketing's team of professionals will make sure that the model looks fantastic, with a vast array of furniture catalogs to use to furnish your digital apartment. Tenants will be instantly hooked when they see the beautiful CGI-rendered images.

Virtual Walkthroughs

If your potential tenants are hesitant to visit your property, don't dismiss their concerns. It's essential to accommodate tenants, especially with the new measures introduced because of the COVID-19 epidemic. Being friendly and approachable can start with a viewing of the apartment itself.

However, to lessen the risk for all parties involved, consider moving your walkthroughs to your tenants' screens. Using Zoom or even FaceTime or WhatsApp video is a perfect solution to a modern problem.

Zoom allows property managers and landlords to set up meetings with clients online and engage in video chats. You can use it to walk them through your property when social distancing measures prevent personal contact. When combined with powerful scheduling tools, you can fill your day with virtual viewings, each specifically suited for the individual tenant.

Electronic Signatures

If in-person meetings are prohibited, you can easily send and sign a contract online. eSignatures remove the need to schedule an appointment and save both your and your customer time.

Services such as DocuSign or HelloSign allow you to easily send and sign contracts and other relevant property management documents. You can send a lease online through one of these apps and receive a signed contract in return that's securely stored on the cloud and readily available. No more lugging papers around to find that lease from months ago. If you use DocuSign or HelloSign, all of your contracts are at your fingertips.

Email Campaigns

If you want to expand your reach, you need to leave your email marketing to the professionals. MailChimp is made for one task only: generating great email campaigns for your business. When you use MailChimp, the core parts of the app work together to make sure the right people see your campaign at the right time.

MailChimp email campaigns can increase click-through rates by 49% compared to regular email campaigns, which is an astounding number from such an intuitively designed platform. You can use MailChimp to get to your tenants faster and ensure the right prospective candidates are getting property updates.

What MailChimp does for you can't be manually replicated, so don't miss out on the chance to save yourself a lot of effort and have them design your next email campaign.

Feedback, Forms, & Surveys

If you're running a short-term rental business, a high turnover of clients can make it difficult to collect useful feedback. When there are so many questions to ask, you must have the right platform to perform quality surveys. Collecting valuable feedback through surveys is a vital part of improving the long-term benefits of your business. Nevermore so than today, when you mustn't fall behind the competition.

To get the best surveys possible, we recommend one of the following options:

• Google Forms are a great way to easily manage surveys right from your browser, without the need to install additional tools or apps. It's integrated with your Gmail account, so easily accessible. And it's completely free.
• SurveyMonkey provides accessibility and ease of use in its dedicated surveying platform. Doing a survey is fast and straightforward, and you can quickly gather the results for analysis right away.
• WuFoo forms are a streamlined subsidiary of SurveyMonkey, allowing you to make forms to allow for both feedback gathering and other options such as receiving payments and sending confirmation emails to your customers.
• TypeForm adds a twist to the traditional survey process by having each question neatly separated, just like a personalized Q&A or a conversation. Plus, it has a very generous free offer and neat but practical designs.

Online Property Management Software

If you're looking for one property management system to manage every part of your property management business, consider using the leading property management software, DoorLoop.

DoorLoop is an all-in-one property management software that offers a robust set of features with incredible ease-of-use for any number of units.

If you’re looking for:

• The peace of mind you can get from property management services streamlining and simplifying your property management efforts
• In a lightning-fast and easy-to-use package
• With competitive pricing

Check out DoorLoop.

But don’t take our word for it, check out this impressive list of features:

DoorLoop features:

• Robust accounting suite: Everything you need to manage all your property accounting in one place, no difficult QuickBooks workarounds necessary.
• QuickBooks integration: Rather integrate with QuickBooks and use it? You can do that too.
• Convenient owner and tenant portals: Communicate with tenants, collect rent online, and even send in maintenance requests all from within the app.
• Invaluable maintenance management features: Speaking of maintenance, edit and track maintenance requests with attachments, send them to vendors, pay those vendors, and even communicate with tenants on those requests simply and easily.
• A plethora of leasing tools: Get access to automatic listings, leasing templates, and background checks (for a better tenant screening process), which will make the entire process more streamlined.
• And much more

DoorLoop pricing

DoorLoop’s starter plan comes in at just $49 per month for up to 20 properties.

Schedule a free DoorLoop demo today!

The New Normal

Times have most certainly changed during COVID-19, in both global terms and property management.

To keep up with today's challenges, you need access to the best online property management tools.

If you take these steps to digitize your business, you will undoubtedly increase your efficiency and profits.

Want to learn how to choose the best property management software to automate your business? Check out this free whitepaper!