The top property management tools offload time-intensive tasks so landlords and real estate investors spend less time completing one-off chores.
When you zoom out and look at the entire picture as it relates to your portfolio rather than reacting to issues as they arise, you empower yourself to approach property management tasks proactively.
Ready to get a head start? Let’s examine the top tools for simplifying property management tasks to understand how each tool benefits time-strapped real estate investors and landlords.
Key Aspects of Property Management and Relevant Tools
You must complete many tasks between vacancy and residency to ensure maximum return on investment (ROI). When properties sit vacant, they lose money.
But pushing your listing out to all the most popular rental property websites requires landlords to take photographs, write listings, and post the property across multiple websites. Property management tools that speed this process up free you to focus elsewhere.
Know that rental listings aren’t the only manual processes you have to account for, though. Screening tenants and creating leases are essential processes that must be locked down before anyone submits a rent payment.
Then, once you’ve got an occupied unit, collecting rent and ensuring the property stays well-maintained are vital to keeping the bills paid and your tenants happy.
To speed it all up, prop-tech companies created feature-rich software to help DIY landlords and real estate investors complete their tasks without leaving a browser window. For mobile landlords, apps alleviate the complexity and stressors associated with property management.
Property Advertising Tools and Applications
As discussed above, rental advertising often takes landlords a lot of time to complete, and it doesn’t come without questions. Which sites are the best ones to advertise on? And how many leads can I get from a single site?
Our rental syndication property management tool takes your property listing and can even help you draft descriptions with AI. Then, with a single click it posts your rental to nearly 20 websites. Your listing generally results in at least 28 leads, which you can then manage inside TurboTenant without entering your username and password for all the individual websites on which you list your property.
If you do end up with a large number of applications, you’ll want an easy way to store them all without letting any slip through the cracks. TurboTenant stores all your applicants in a single location, so you won’t have to hunt for them in your stack of notes.
Generally, landlords who use these features find a tenant in fewer than 30 days.
Tenant Screening Tools
Once you’ve identified leads, screening renters to ensure they’re a good fit is good practice and can help you eliminate a costly eviction, so doing it right is worth the effort.
Thankfully, tenant screening is a fairly simple process with the right tool. You’ll plug all the details of interested renters into a website and wait for the results. But before you can do that, you’ll need to collect screening fees from your tenant.
But with TurboTenant applicant screening, you provide just one piece of information: your tenant’s email. Then, TurboTenant turns the screening process over to your tenant, who inputs all their data without going through you – thus eliminating the possibility of you misplacing it.
After identity verification, you’ll receive a report that contains their credit score, lines of credit, debt in collections, criminal record (where allowed), past evictions, and more to ensure you put the right tenant in your property.
When your tenants handle payment and screening themselves, you save time.
Lease Agreement Generator
After you’ve found the perfect tenant, you’ll need a lease agreement to solidify the terms and expectations you have for your rental property. Starting from scratch can be daunting depending on your property and the specifics you need to account for.
With lease agreement generators, you provide the most relevant details, such as the lease terms and length, who’s living in the unit, monthly rent obligations, security deposit amount, rent due date, and whether or not the tenant can have a pet.
While these frameworks are simple enough, each state has its own requirements, which can muddy the waters. But if you use TurboTenant, you can build a state-specific lease that outlines all the most critical details in about 10 minutes while complying with state regulations.
Then, when it’s time to sign the document, TurboTenant’s e-sign option enables landlords and tenants to do so without meeting in person — at no extra cost.
Rent Collection Tools
Rent collection is a task that has yet to enter the digital age for many landlords. People don’t regularly carry cash, and the last time most folks saw a check, it came in the mail from Grandma as a birthday gift.
For your tenants, that often means that paying rent is a hassle. They’ll have to go to the bank and get a wad of cash or maybe head to the convenience store for a money order. Some will ask Grandma how to fill out a check.
For landlords, monthly trips to the bank to deposit cash aren’t such a big deal — though depending on your number of tenants, collecting from each of your renters might be a headache, especially if you operate as a remote landlord.
However, with online rent collection tools, you can securely accept ACH bank transfers and credit or debit card payments through TurboTenant’s online portal. Plus, your tenants can set up automatic payments to automate the process further.
Regarding landlord rent collection automation, TurboTenant can set up automatic late fees, push email reminders to tenants to pay, send rent receipts, and track it all in an easy-to-use interface.
Maintenance Request Tools
Even after you’ve got a tenant in the unit and rent payments are simplified, some of the fixtures in your property might let you down.
Sinks leak, refrigerators stop cooling, and sometimes the pilot light goes out. Generally, your tenant will text or email you to state they’re having a problem. Keeping track of texts, emails, and phone calls isn’t always easy.
Plus, those requests can come in the dead of night. A great property management tool to help with these requests is the maintenance request tool from TurboTenant.
With this automation, you or your tenant simply submit a request. We troubleshoot the problem with your tenant and determine whether or not a contractor is required to complete the job. If a pro is needed, TurboTenant finds a qualified contractor to complete the request — all while keeping your budget in mind.
Keep in mind: We partner with Lula to coordinate maintenance requests and Lula doesn’t operate everywhere.
Once the work is done, our team reviews the notes and photos for quality and fairness. Then, you receive before and after images, contractor notes, and an invoice directly in TurboTenant.
Calculator Tools
Figuring out some of the more math-dependent tasks related to rental property management can startle anyone straight. You might put a green accounting visor on your head, bust out a sheet of paper, and use a calculator to get to it.
Or you could locate all the relevant details of what you want to calculate and enter them into a pre-built calculator that will spit out exactly what you need to see in minutes.
TurboTenant has several calculators that do just that, and we’re always building more. Quickly determining rent-to-income ratios, prorated rents, and rental property figures like cash flow, cap rate, and ROI allows you to make decisions faster and more confidently.
Advantages of Using TurboTenant’s All-In-One Software
Using any of the property management tools we’ve outlined here will save you time. But it doesn’t make sense if you have to search multiple websites, jot down figures, enter details into spreadsheets or notebooks, and compile them later.
That’s why we put all these tools in one location. From your TurboTeant landlord dashboard, you can access every property management tool listed from a single window. You don’t need to remember who paid rent or which property has a leaky faucet; it’s all accessible in TurboTenant with just a few clicks.
Join more than 600,000 landlords who’ve switched to modernized property management. Don’t believe us? Check out our 700+ reviews on Reviews.io to see how landlords like you use property management tools to grow their rental businesses.
