6 Things to Look For In a Tenant Tracking and Lease Management Tool

There are several factors to owning and operating a successful rental property business. The first is to find great deals and secure properties that will be popular with tenants, will cash flow, and will allow you to build equity in an appreciating asset for long-term financial gain.

Next, you have to secure great tenants and reduce your vacancy rates. For this, there are various solutions such as Zillow, Zumper, Hotpads, Trulia, and many more. Rental listing sites like these allow you to easily market your rentals to a vast audience of prospective tenants.  Once you have tenant applicants, you need to screen your tenants with a tenant screening tool such as the one built into Landlord Studio.

Then there are the landlord responsibilities and legal obligations that you must be familiar with as well as the day-to-day financial tracking. The more detailed and accurate this is, the more likely you’ll be able to file an accurate tax return, minimize your overheads, and maximize tax deductions.

For the day-to-day operation and management of your rentals, you need to track and manage your tenants and leases. This entails managing regular communications with your tenants such as welcome letters, rent reminders, and any notices that you might need to send such as a notice of entry or notice of non-renewal.

As you gain more properties, there are various ways that you can track and manage your tenancies. For example, you might start off with a spreadsheet detailing all of your current leases and tenant details. However, as your portfolio scales, this method quickly becomes overly complicated and things can easily fall through the cracks. A better way is to use purpose-built software designed to make tenant tracking and lease management as easy as possible.

In this article, we take a look at some of the key features to look for in a tenant tracking and lease management tool, and how they can help make your life as a landlord easier and your rental property business more efficient.

Lease Management and Tenant Tracking Features Essential For The Modern Landlord

Lease Tracking

As a landlord, you need to track all of your leases individually. This means keeping data regarding your existing leases properly organized and easily accessible. This data should include when the lease started, the lease end date, the rent amount, tenant details, payment due dates, etc. Essentially everything that is included in the lease.

Automated Rent Reminders

A key part of being a landlord is collecting rent. However, it’s very easy for a tenant to forget to pay. With a system in place like Landlord Studio, you can set automated rent reminder emails and dramatically reduce the chance of late or missed rent.

The advantages of automated rent reminders include:

• They save you time as you’re not manually chasing your tenants each month,
• Your tenants are less likely to forget or be late with the rent
• both you and your tenant will have clear records of the communications which could be important should you need to pursue an eviction.

With Landlord Studio, you can further reduce the chances of late and missed rent by enabling online rent collection. This allows tenants to pay via ACH and transfer directly into your bank account. Tenants can set up automated rent payments so that they never forget to pay again.

Track Current and Past Tenants

Alongside tracking and managing your lease, you need to keep records of all of your tenants. However, as your portfolio grows and you get more tenants, traditional pen and paper methods quickly become unwieldy.

If you can’t figure out which lease the tenant belongs to after they make a maintenance request or aren’t easily able to determine which rent check to assign to which property, then you can quickly find yourself making time-consuming admin errors. Not to mention, should the worst come to worst and you need to pursue an eviction you will need to assemble all the records pertaining to the tenancy.

Manage Tenant Communications

As well as keeping better detailed and more accurate records of your current tenants, you can also automate and streamline regular tenant communications using software like Landlord Studio. For example, you can create a welcome email template that can be used to send out to all of your new tenants. Or you can generate automatically generate and send out invoices and receipts for tenant payable expenses as well as our aforementioned rent reminder emails.

Set Reminder Notifications

An additional important feature to look for is notifications. There will be various important dates such as safety checks for appliances, utility payments, and routine property inspections.

Setting a reminder to notify you before important dates will ensure that you don’t forget. You can also be confident that you are giving your tenant the required legal notice before you or one of your contractors or employees enters the property. This feature is an essential way to stop important things from slipping through the cracks. Losing track can become increasingly problematic as your portfolio scales.

Document Storage

From property inspection documents and inventories, safety certificates, leases, and more. Keep all of your crucial property-related documentation organized using Landlord Studio. All of your documents will be stored on our secure cloud server and will be accessible from anywhere.

Find out more about how Landlord Studio can help you mange your rentals →

Final Words

Ultimately, having a tenant tracking and lease management tool is all about running an efficient and professional rental business.

It allows you to stay on top of important communications and events and perhaps more importantly, it will help you ensure on-time rent collections and keep all of your documentation and communications in order.

Using a system like Landlord Studio means that all of the information, reminders, and automations are in a single well-organized place. As your business grows, its demands on your time won’t. Instead, you can create streamlined and efficient processes.

On top of this, the best tools aren’t single purpose. Landlord Studio, for example, is more than just a tenant tracking and management tool. It is a financial tracking and property management tool designed by landlords for landlords. With Landlord Studio you can run tenant screenings, collect rent online, create rental listings to find tenants faster, and reduce vacancies.

Finally, our comprehensive financial tracking system allows you to keep accurate and detailed records throughout the tax year. Update your expenses on the go via our app, digitize receipts at the point of sale, and generate reports on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis. It’s perfect for tax time and for gaining nuanced insights into your portfolio’s performance.

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