Automation is everywhere at the moment. According to Deloitte’s Global Intelligent Automation Survey 2022, 87% of organisations have accelerated their investment in cloud-hosted automation services in the past year.
To many, automation can sound scary. It brings to mind images of robots taking over and humans being displaced because their tasks have been given to computers. But automation doesn’t have to mean total replacement.
Use it in an intelligent way to handle low-value, repetitive and time-intensive tasks and it becomes the perfect approach for a relationship-driven industry like property management.
Reducing repetitive processes
From contractor visits to reactive and planned maintenance, looking after properties requires a lot of tasks to be repeated across the portfolio. Although individually these tasks don’t require much time investment, they soon add up, especially when they have to be repeated multiple times across different properties with little variation.
Automation can be used to send out communications using templates when certain events occur. These could be when a repair request has been made when a contractor has confirmed a visit, or when a repair has been completed.
Details such as addresses and contact details can be inputted automatically, saving hours spent looking up information and adding it. The key thing with this approach is that everything stays fully customisable — nothing will be sent out that the property manager hasn’t chosen to send.
Keeping stakeholders in the loop
A lot of people are involved in the average property repair. Tenants, contractors, and landlords must have the right information at the right time, and ensuring each party has what they need when they need it, can take up a lot of a property manager’s day.
Automation tools can be instructed through rules set by the user. These rules determine who is contacted at each stage. So, if you have a plumber you trust, you could instruct them to be asked for a quote whenever a water-related problem is reported.
Or perhaps you would like to inform a landlord whenever a job reaches a certain cost threshold or tell a tenant when a contractor will arrive. The possibilities are endless for completing tasks without user intervention.
Improving customer experiences
A McKinsey & Company survey in 2022 found that the second most common reason businesses chose to automate was to improve experiences for customers or employees. Customer experience is vital in a people-led industry like property management. Tenant or landlord communications can go sour if they receive no response.
It’s very simple to stop them from feeling like they're shouting into the void. You could customise a message to send out every time a tenant reports a maintenance issue. It could detail what you’re going to do next and the expected time frame. The automation is controlled — if an issue comes up that needs more sensitive handling, your automation won’t stop you from reaching out and handling things manually.
Or you could choose which situations you want to contact a landlord, such as when certain types of maintenance issues are reported or when approval is needed for certain types of repair.
Staying on top of finance
Invoicing, ledgers, and balancing the books are vital parts of every business. How much time is spent ensuring the right costs go to the right places and that you have an invoice to support every transaction?
Proptech systems often integrate with each other, such as repairs and maintenance solutions feeding into a property management system.
By integrating these two things, you can ensure that maintenance costs are instantly transferred to the right ledger whenever they occur. No switching between software or entering data twice.
Taking the stress out of emergency repairs handling
It’s a familiar scenario: you finish a long working week and are ready for a relaxing weekend. But just because the office is closed, it doesn’t stop maintenance issues from cropping up. So you have two options: come back on Monday to a deluge of new things to deal with and angry tenants wondering why you haven’t sent a contractor yet, or stay glued to your phone and emails when it’s supposed to be your time off.
There is, in fact, a third way. Automation lets you triage the emergencies from the issues that can wait and contact contractors to investigate the issue, all without you touching a button.
Never missing planned maintenance
When you add up the number of compliance events the average property has, then multiply it by the number of properties in your portfolio, that’s a lot to remember. There’s a better way to handle planned maintenance.
A “set and forget” PPM system does the hard work for you. All you need to do is add an event and specify how often it should recur. Then, contractors can be contacted automatically for quotes — or landlords asked for approval first, if you prefer.
Automation provided by our Contractor Marketplace has allowed agents to resolve issues 2.5x faster and vastly reduce time spent on administrative tasks.
