Tenants are the riskiest factors of property management. While managing a property as a landlord has many headaches, the inherent risks of owning property can be reduced with insurance and proper maintenance. Tenants, on the other hand, carry all the risks inherent to human nature — which are not as easy to manage.
That is why improving your tenant screening, marketing, and management processes with a tenant portal is vital to increasing your profit margins as a landlord — and reducing headaches.
Here are five ways tenant portal software can help landlords find and keep good tenants.
Apartments Hunters Filter Themselves for You
A tenant portal, especially utilized during the open house and application process, helps potential applicants know the terms and conditions of your lease before choosing to apply. This helps apartment hunters make an informed choice that fits their situation before they submit a background and credit check.
This increased transparency helps both you and apartment hunters save time and resources in the application process.
Credit and Background Checks Become Effortless
In the past, waiting for a credit and background check from a potential tenant took days — sometimes even weeks — and that extra time meant more time your property sat vacant. And depending on the market, you may not have had the luxury of waiting for a credit or background check and chose to lease without one.
Now with tenant portals, you can require a credit and background check as part of an application and know almost instantly whether that potential tenant is a good fit for your property. These instant results help you fill vacancies quicker with less risk.
Rent Collection Becomes Automatic
No landlord misses the days of waiting for rent checks in the mail. But the current practice of using digital money transfer services like PayPal or Venmo, while relatively instant, also have hidden costs that eat into your bottom line.
With a tenant portal you don’t need to rely on a third party service to collect rent nor are you charged extra fees for using their service. And unlike other money transferring services, with a tenant portal you can issue itemized invoices each month so that both you and your tenant know exactly what is being charged.
Fees Enforces Themselves
Unlike manual tenant management processes where it is easy for landlords to feel like “bad guys” for issuing late fees or eviction notices, tenant portals can now do that for you. Tenant portals in effect make it easier for you to enforce and collect fees from tenants.
Tenant management software not only issue the appropriate rent invoices to your tenants, but can be programmed to send automatic email reminders to your tenants about rent and other important information.
Bookkeeping Is Managed For You
Tenant portals, unlike money transferring services, are designed to help landlords manage their books. A tenant portal not only tracks tenant payments and fees, but also tracks expenditures you made on the property, which makes filing taxes so much easier come April.
The earmark of a good tenant portal is how easy it makes filing taxes.
While you can get away with not investing in a tenant portal for your property, do you really want to waste extra energy and time doing thankless work that a tenant portal can do for you? If you are like most landlords, your investment property is your part-time job or side gig. But without a proper property management software or process, your part-time job can easily creep into 24/7 occupation without the compensation.
Stop landlord scope creep and invest in a tenant portal today.
