Automation is happening all over the globe. Many industries are experiencing the benefits that come with moving from manual processes to automated systems.
In the real estate industry, automation is helping realtors streamline monotonous tasks, such as administration, bookkeeping, and marketing. Investors are now able to focus on productive tasks, such as deal flow. This helps generate more income, save costs, and scale your business.
Automated systems usually require minimal effort and attention once they’re in place. So, how can you automate real estate investment and focus on deal flow? In this article, we look at the most practical ways to automate real estate investment processes.
- Tenant Applications
Automating your tenant application process is straightforward. For example, you can use Google Forms, where applicants enter their details and you screen them based on the information presented. With this tool, you only need a Gmail address. You can then create the form in under 30 minutes.
Automating tenant application and screening has various advantages for investors. They include:
- Less time is spent screening unqualified tenants
- Immediate disqualification of applications based on predetermined criteria
- Reducing the chances of showing your property to tenants who might not be interested or qualified
- Easily getting in touch with responsive tenants via email or text and find those who’re genuinely interested
Such tools help you access all your applicants’ details on one spreadsheet. You can also send prospective tenants a link to the application form and receive automated alerts once they’ve completed the application.
- Work Orders
Managing and meeting maintenance needs for your property becomes a challenge for many real estate investors, especially when their business begins to scale.
Scheduling and keeping up with maintenance schedules for multiple properties in a portfolio can be a headache. Just think about all activities that happen during work orders. Sometimes your tenants issue repair requests, which you assign to service providers by making an emergency work order. You know how important this process is as you don’t want a frustrated tenant.
This process can take up a significant amount of your time. This is why you need to automate it and concentrate on other priority tasks. Automated property maintenance tools allow you to:
- Receive maintenance and repair requests
- Manage service providers
- Communicate within the app
- Create and update a to-do list
- Generate reports
Automating work orders for your real estate investments also helps you avoid regular complaints. For example, running regular maintenance for your HVAC systems will improve your tenants’ living conditions. You can update them on the status each time you run maintenance and repairs. More importantly, this will keep your tenancy rate high.
- Financial Management
Similar to managing work orders, financial management especially for numerous properties can be a challenge. Luckily, you can also automate financial management for your real estate investments.
There are various automation tools that help you with financial tracking for your properties. Some even go ahead to integrate property and financial management into one. With them, you get accounting as well as property tracking features.
The following are the major advantages of investing in automated real estate financial management software:
- Monitor Investment Performance- Real estate financial management software makes reporting much easier. You can track the performance of your entire portfolio, or narrow it down to individual properties. This is essential whether you own single-family, multi-family, or short-term rental units.
- Automate Accounting- By automating your properties’ financial management, you eliminate paperwork and manual filing. This helps you streamline and simplify your accounting. Also, manual filing is prone to a lot of human errors. Automated accounting systems however are accurate.
- Scale and Optimize- Automated real estate financial management software helps you keep your data safe and secure. The software utilizes data security measures to protect key information. This can help you collaborate with other investors because it promotes accountability.
- Marketing
The real estate industry remains one of the most competitive fields. A single misstep can be fatal for your business. The market always has a large number of leads that many businesses barely leverage. Automating your real estate marketing efforts can place you significantly ahead of your competitors.
Think about it; realtors and agents have a rough time keeping up with each potential client. It’s also quite time-consuming. However, with an automated real estate marketing software, you can collect all your interested leads’ contact details and save them in a database.
The more leads you have in your sales funnel, the higher your potential of converting them into sales. With all the information now in a database, you can segment your leads based on criteria, such as location and age. This is vital as it helps you personalize your marketing efforts.
You can then dispatch timely emails or text messages to their devices and keep them updated. This will help increase engagement and bring in more business. Automating your real estate marketing efforts makes it more straightforward.
Automating your Real Estate Investing Systems
Great real estate investors are always ready to embrace groundbreaking trends for their business. You should also focus on eliminating or streamlining tasks that are repetitive or don’t necessarily require your involvement. This will help you channel your focus on tasks that really matter.
Automation helps you save time and expenses for your business. This means that you can now channel your effort, time, and money towards business growth and scaling. Most importantly, it keeps your pipeline full of deal flow.
There’s primarily no reason why you shouldn’t consider automating your real estate business processes to focus on deal flow.
