There’s an old Chinese proverb that says, “give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” You’ve likely heard this saying before, but have you really thought about it as it applies to your job as a property manager?
If you’re cutting corners here and there to save time and money, you’re basically giving yourself a fish. If you’re adopting a way to permanently improve your efficiency and save tremendous amounts of time and money long-term, on the other hand, then you’re really learning how to fish.
Here are five other lessons that might help you see the value of using property management software:
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The market is difficult to keep up with.
Without property management software, keeping up with the market is a highly manual process. It’s similar to the stock market. Would you rather look up individual stocks and how they’re doing one-by-one, or would you like to see an automatically updated view of all your stocks on one screen? Property management software consolidates market data and lets you monitor expirations and market rates for similar properties to the ones in your portfolio.
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Physical documents aren’t as secure as you might think.
It’s easy to fall for the lie that just because your documents aren’t online and “vulnerable to hackers,” that they’re more secure. Data pirates have long been attempting to steal data even if it’s on a hard copy or your personal/work computer drive. The right property management’s cloud-based authentication protocols, on the other hand, are designed for optimum security.
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It’s easy to lose track of important dates.
Out of all of our leases, do you know which one has the closest lease expiration? What about which one is due for a rent bump? What about insurance increases? Oh, and did you remember to send notifications to tenants about all of these ahead of time? It’s easy to lose track of important dates, especially when you’re dealing with multiple properties. Property management software can help you create critical date reminders and use data to forecast.
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Managing data across multiple properties is cumbersome.
Managing one property is a full-time job in itself. Managing multiple properties — and all of the data associated with them — can get downright overwhelming. Property management software makes it easy to record data (and changes to data) for all of your properties in one place, whether it’s maintenance reminders, lease issues, equipment tracking or some other critical point related to a specific property.
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Building reports can take days.
How many long nights and cups of coffee have you gone through trying to track down the information you need for reports? Even if you’re a master of the spreadsheet, building reports can be a time-intensive process that takes days. If you could hire someone to do all of the manual report-building work so you can focus on the bigger picture and analyze reports for presentations, wouldn’t you? That’s what property management software does, as you can build customized dashboards that automatically update. Then you can spend minutes or hours on reports, not days.
Lessons learned? If you’d like to see how property management software can teach you a better way to handle your portfolio, request a demo of Quarem today.
