Finding Your First Home

Posted on: 24 December 2015

If you do not have a website for your properties or your website is outdated, you may be missing out on attracting new tenants and improving the satisfaction of your current tenants. With the right website or property management software, you can make your property stand out and make your job easier.

Do More Than Floor Plans

Many websites continue to use floor plans to give prospective tenants an idea of what their apartment will look like on the inside. With advances in technology, consider including better ways of giving visitors to your website a view of the property. You can easily do panoramic pictures of the inside of apartments to display in an online gallery. This way, anyone can have a better view of each apartment layout. You do not need to hire a photographer or buy a special camera, many smartphone cameras come with a panoramic mode.

You may also want to consider including panoramic pictures for the entire property. Use this opportunity to point out amenities, such as parking areas, playgrounds or the laundry room. Prospective tenants will make judgements about your property before they ever come for a visit. You want any information they see to convince them you should be one of the properties they visit.

Include Online Maintenance

You can include a section on your website for maintenance requests. If you do not currently use any software to help manage your property, you may want to consider the investment to help improve efficiency. Many types of software allow for integration into your website. You want to make it easy for tenants to fill out maintenance requests, but you also want a system where tenants can track their service request throughout the process. It helps if tenants are able to see if their request has been acknowledged and have a general idea of when their request will be fulfilled.

Consider A Live Chat

If you have a traditional rental office, consider including a live chat where your employees can answer questions in addition to their normal job duties. This makes it easy for prospective and current tenants alike to speak directly with an employee in real time, during normal business hours. A live chat feature saves time and effort for all parties involved. Applicants and tenants do not have to go to the rental office to ask questions that could be easily handled virtually.

Integrate Online Payments

Many property managers continue to require application fees, deposits and rent payments with a check or money order. Since it is more commonplace for people to forgo the use of checks in favor of debit cards, the extra process of withdrawing cash from the ATM and buying money orders is an unnecessary hassle. If you currently accept cash for application fees and deposits, you can eliminate the concern your employees may have with handling cash and keeping it safely in the rental office. Applicants can also secure an apartment by paying their deposit at any time of the day, especially if they typically work during your normal business hours.

Investing in a website can speak volumes about your property and your responsibility as a property manager. A website with quality information and features to make ordinary processes easier will improve efficiency for current and prospective tenants.