Top Property Management Tools to Streamline Your Duties

The top property management tools offload time-intensive tasks, allowing landlords and real estate investors to spend less time completing one-off chores.

When you zoom out and look at the entire picture in relation 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 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 listing 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.

Remember that rental listings aren’t the only manual processes you have to account for. Screening tenants and creating leases are essential processes that must be locked down before anyone submits a rent payment.

Then, once you have an occupied unit, collecting rent and ensuring the property remains well-maintained are vital to keeping the bills paid and your tenants happy.

To expedite the process, prop-tech companies developed feature-rich software to assist DIY landlords and real estate investors in completing their tasks without needing to leave a browser window. For mobile landlords, all-in-one apps alleviate the complexity and stressors associated with property management.

Property Advertising Tools and Applications

As discussed above, rental advertising often requires landlords to spend a significant amount of time completing it, 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 assist you in drafting 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. Our software will store all your applicants in a single location, so you won’t have to hunt for them in your stack of notes.

Generally, landlords who utilize these features find a tenant within 30 days or less.

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 relatively 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 transfers the screening process to your tenant, who inputs all their data directly, eliminating the possibility of incorrect information being entered.

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 and money.

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 the specifics of your property and the requirements you need to account for.

With state-specific lease agreement generators, you provide the most relevant details, such as lease terms and length, the identity of the occupants, monthly rent obligations, security deposit amount, rent due date, and whether the tenant is permitted to have a pet.

While these frameworks are simple enough, each state has its own requirements, which can muddy the waters. However, if you use TurboTenant, you can create a state-specific lease that outlines all the most critical details in approximately 10 minutes, while also 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.

Digital Rent Collection

Rent collection 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 likely 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 the 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. Additionally, your tenants can set up automatic payments to further automate the process.

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 warm up, and sometimes the pilot light goes out. Generally, your tenant will text or email you to report a problem. Keeping track of texts, emails, and phone calls can be challenging.

Here’s how you can simplify. TurboTenant’s Maintenance Request feature allows tenants to submit requests directly from their tenant portal. From there, they add relevant details and images so you know exactly what’s going on. And because it filters directly into your TurboTenant account, you won’t need to dig through your emails or texts to sort the problem out.

Calculators

Figuring out some of the more math-dependent tasks related to rental property management can be daunting for anyone at first. You might put a green accounting visor on your head, bust out a sheet of paper, and use a calculator to get to it.

Alternatively, you can locate all the relevant details of what you want to calculate and enter them into a pre-built calculator that will provide the exact results you need in minutes.

TurboTenant offers several calculators that do just that, and we’re continually expanding our offerings. Quickly determining rent-to-income ratios, prorated rents, and rental property figures, such as 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 and effort. But doing so 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 TurboTenant landlord dashboard, you can access every property management tool listed from a single window.

Join more than 850,000 landlords who’ve switched to modernized property management. Don’t believe us? Check out our sterling feedback on Reviews.io to see how landlords like you use property management tools to grow their rental businesses.