You’ve decided that to manage your college housing project appropriately, you will need property management software to keep up with the hundreds of students moving in and out of your housing units. Unfortunately, there are just too many apartments; the students have a plethora of needs that can be overwhelming to handle on your own. To make matters worse, you’ve been storing all your data on paper, requiring extra help translating to added operating costs.
It may be your first time experimenting with property management software—I do say “experimenting” because trial and error and shopping around may be the only way you find the software solution that is best suited to your needs.
Property management software
There are various software options for you to choose from at varying price points. Of course, many will claim to do this and that, but it is ultimately up to you to decide which is best. Thankfully, better property management providers are transparent about their software services and the price points they ask to provide such services.
As a property owner looking for management software with many variables, a feature you should pay attention to is management agents. Nope, these agents don’t wear suits like typical real estate agents. Instead, management agents are bots written into the software to perform a specific task in the event a prescribed action takes place within the software.
That might sound like complicated computer jargon, but that’s ok. I will explain how management agents in your property management software encourage a logical succession of events when managing your various properties and, more importantly, how they will benefit you.
What management agents do
Management agents within your property management software are there to ensure the program is one step ahead of you in logging information regarding your properties.. Management agents are both proactive and reactive; they are designed to align with your specific needs or desires regarding your rental properties.
Let’s take this reactive scenario as an example. Say a tenant pays their rent on time using an internet-based payment terminal provided by your property management software. The management agent sees the payment and recognizes that it was paid in full and on time. This information may get passed on to another management agent within the software that generates “late payment” notices. The programmed action that follows is removing the name of the tenant who paid on time from that list or adding their name to a list of tenants who usually pay on time.
Now let’s look into a proactive approach to see the difference. Your property management software disperses an email to tenants who need to remember rent due dates. That helps them avoid late payment fees or a worst-case scenario like eviction. All of this was done upon the tenant making their payments and a combination of their payment histories.
Identifying patterns and creating work flows
Such a complex system would be capable of “learning” the patterns of tenants and prescribing specific approaches to deal with them. The only task asked of you is to manually monitor the results generated by your property management software after your initial setup, where you will establish your various preferences. These preferences can include due dates for rent, the total amount owed, and the late fee amount.
If tenants have not paid their rent on time or in full, management agents can reproduce the same process. In addition, the management agent can be programmed to issue a late fee to the tenant’s account or issue an eviction notice if their late payments have become an ongoing trend.
This beneficial aspect of the program can be applied to nearly every part of rental management. For example, billing, maintenance, vacancies, etc., can all be streamlined with management agents—all they need is a specific catalyst that you establish in your initial setup to produce a desired result.
As time goes on, you may need to add more tasks for your management agents to do. As a result, more variables are introduced to your operations, so you may need to change how the software interacts with the different aspects of your management processes. Making tweaks and additions all serves to make your property management solution as seamless and convenient for you as possible.
Why management agents are indispensable
The utilization of adequate property management can make or break a landlord. The market shows that investing in larger-scale property acquisitions such as apartments, condos, and dormitories yields more rewards, but these investments are costly by all means. In addition, these investments will require higher initial risks, which further solidifies the need for property management solutions.
Property management software with management agents well integrated into the software is the best option for more extensive rental property operations. With thousands of variables involved in the process comes thousands of opportunities to make mistakes during the process if left to your own devices. Having a software program compare and file important information strategically leaves little room for human error because the human aspect is limited to the initial setup and observation of results.
By no means does this mean that property management software will do everything or do your job for you, however. It is simply designed to help streamline your experience by allowing you to manage your properties thoroughly, logically, and effortlessly.
Key Takeaway
Managing agents is one of the many aspects of property management software that makes it so comprehensive and valuable to rental property owners looking for a secure method of managing their accounts.
As you may be imagining, management agents are highly convenient, saving time, effort, and sometimes even money, as though more efficient operations tend to grant higher returns on investments. After all, that is the ultimate goal of everyone involved in real estate!