Anyone who ever said the property management business is easy or quick clearly never did the job themselves. Between dealing with tenant maintenance requests, the continuous pressure to cut costs, and world events like financial downturns and COVID-19, it’s a wonder managers ever have time to rest.
A big part of the reason for why property management is so time consuming is that managers have to deal with a huge volume of data every day. Lease data, market data, economic data, building data, tenant data, energy use data...the list goes on and on.
Even if your property operation is relatively well digitized, managing all this data is difficult. Needing to go into different applications to view important information, exporting data to PDFs or (gasp) printing out spreadsheets or leases, jumping from program to program, and more, all of these things take a huge amount of time and patience to manage once in a while, let alone every day as most property managers must do.
There are a number of solutions that can help save managers time when dealing with all of this data. Let’s dive into them! We’ll start with covering digitization and digitalization.
digitization plus digitalization
The most elementary step is to simply ensure that all of your data is digitized, or converted to digital formats. Making sure your leases and tenant correspondence is digital, and all other existing company data is converted into a digital format will make it much easier to organize, search through, and ultimately use your mountains of information. This will save time when there is a need to access your archived data. That translates to less wasted property management hours, happier property managers, and happier tenants.
Once you no longer have to contend with heaps of paperwork, it will be a lot easier to get more streamlined and time-effective in your management operations. This is where digitalization comes in: the transformation of processes from analog to digital. Instead of receiving physical leases and digitizing them later, a digitalized process is entirely digital.
Achieving this requires implementing the right digital tools that are easy to use, secure, and cost-effective. You’ll need all the apps that handle each discrete property management task, whether it is leasing, tenant experience, maintenance ticketing, or whatever else. These apps will be the heart of your digitalized property management toolbox, a crucial component in your ESG strategy, and a vital part of your overall time-saving strategy.
But just having the tools isn’t enough. Your tools need to talk to each other, sharing information and passing data back and forth to allow for truly efficient management practices. Creating a service ticket from your tenant experience application, a phone system that transcribes voice mails for delivery directly to your property managers’ smartphones, and predictive maintenance – these are just a few of the systems and implementations that demonstrate how software can work for property managers, saving them time and reducing their workloads, rather than adding on yet another pointless system to learn.
One of the best ways to see the time-saving benefits of property management digitalization is to consider the example of a property management dashboard. Like the instrument panel in a car, dashboards provide at a glance information into the most important measurables at your property. Take Spaceflow’s FLOW dashboard for instance. It provides managers with instantaneous, realtime insight into power consumption, water consumption, heating energy use, temperature, humidity, and more.
This results in clear time saving for managers who would have otherwise needed to rotate through a multitude of apps or programs to find the information and functionality they need and translate to facility managers or vice-versa.
The real estate business is more competitive than ever before, and property managers are responsible for more processes and systems than they ever have been. It’s understandable that they would not want to waste time on systems that seem like time sinks, but the reality is that some of the most accessible property management tools out there are substantial time savers in their own right.
If you're interested in how Spaceflow data dashboards help to save property management's time, contact us.
