Rental management can be challenging – if you’re not using the right tools. How are you managing your rentals today? Cash rent payments and spreadsheets? Maybe you’re using a Property Manager? Don’t waste your time managing your property by hand or giving away all your profits to a less-than satisfactory property manager. Take advantage of landlord automation tools so you can save time and money to keep your passive income passive.

Keep reading for the top three tips to automate rental management.

1) Fill Vacancies Quickly

The best way to protect your investment and maintain a steady cash flow is with tenants you trust. Great tenants will pay rent on-time and take good care of your investment property. Plus, the faster you fill your rental, the less you’ll lose out on due to vacancies.

Recent data from TurboTenant, the all-in-one property management software platform, revealed that over 50% of renters search for their next rental online through platforms like Apartments.com, Redfin, and Craigslist. So in order to find the best renters, you’ll need your listing published to popular online platforms.

And no, you don’t have to spend countless hours and money creating a listing on each individual platform. Instead, use software like TurboTenant to create one listing that’ll automatically syndicate to dozens of top listing sites. Landlords average 28 leads per listing and it’s 100% free to market your rental on TurboTenant.

2) Don’t Waste Your Time on Unqualified Leads

Now that your listing is published to all the right sites to find your dream renter, you’ll want to automate the vetting process. With over 25 leads coming in on each listing, you don’t have time to manually vet each individual. Instead use an automatic pre-screener.

Pre-screeners are 100% free and can be sent to each lead to gather information about whether they’re a good fit for your property. Information like estimated credit score, desired move-in date, pet ownership, and estimated income is helpful to determine who’s the best fit for your property. Just make sure you’re keeping Fair Housing Act guidelines in mind while you screen everyone equitably.

Every lead that comes in through TurboTenant (no matter what site they come from) receives an automatic pre-screener. View the information from your desktop or mobile app and only move forward with renters that are the right fit for your rental.

Pro Tip: Want to further automate your tenant search? Use an online calendar to set custom availability and send a link to leads so they can pick a time that works best for them. TurboTenant has one built into the software and will send both you and your potential tenants a reminder before the appointment to avoid missed showings.

3) Collect Rent On-Time, Every Month

There’s a good deal of rent collection options out there like peer-to-peer payment processors, cash, check, or maybe you’ve even had a tenant request to pay in cryptocurrency? It’s important to use a secure platform that was built for collecting rent. You’re running a business, not splitting a bill. Use a secure online platform so you can keep track of all incoming payments and automate the process so you don’t have to waste your time tracking down rent each month.

Rent collection software like TurboTenant allows you to set custom late fees so you don’t have to worry about manually monitoring if tenants pay on-time and how much they owe for late payments. TurboTenant also sends reminders to renters so you don’t have to be the bad guy. Renters can set up autopay to put payments on autopilot and so you can rest easy knowing rent will be paid on-time every month. The best part? It’s 100% free for landlords.

Other Helpful Tips

While finding quality tenants and professionalizing your rent collection are the best ways to get started with rental management automation, there are so many other ways you can make you and your tenants’ lives easier using software. Take advantage of free tools to calculate target rent, analyze your monthly cash flow, and more.

A better way to landlord, built by a #bebetter version of you.

Rental income isn’t passive and it is full of risks. The landlords we serve are not real estate titans with hundreds of units. They are teachers, nurses, and service members that believe investing in real estate is a path for them to build a better life for themselves and a legacy for their family.

At TurboTenant, our mission is to provide the software and processes to make managing their rentals efficient and professional so they can spend less time managing their properties while hitting their financial goals.