Why do Property Managers Procrastinate?

There’s another kind of plague that’s hit rental management businesses for many years now. It’s called kicking the technology can down the road.

It’s what managers do when the time just doesn’t seem ideal to upgrade their IT, accounting practices, or how they do business. Yet, leveraging technology (as our title graphic above suggests) can help launch you far beyond what your current processes can.

When anyone overcomes the issues that are crippling business performance, their feeling of optimism, certainty, and good health rockets.  And how might you stop procrastinating and get focused on what’s important? We’ve got some ideas!

When the World Keeps on Moving Ahead

For any property manager wanting to grow revenues and end work bottlenecks, the new technology has the answer. Tenants, vendors, government and everyone else are demanding automation, online self-service, service integration, and tech compliance. SaaS solutions give them what they want.

This new Software as a Service environment isn’t just about bringing business online though.

What everyone is after is an affordable system that bypasses manual transactions and low operational efficiency. Because it translates to improved profits. It also translates to new revenue sources, but let’s focus on the key benefit everyone wants right now — efficiency.

Surveys Tell Us What Managers Hope For

Yet property management surveys have revealed that improved efficiency has been a top goal for managers for a long time. Somehow, something keeps getting in the way year after year, and the quest for efficiency never gets resolved.

Given the economic and real estate environment unfolding in 2023, it might be time to look at this matter differently, because the old views are keeping companies vulnerable.

In our industry, the can that’s actually being kicked is the new SaaS, cloud based technology which enables smart automation.

Efficiency Across your Company

Every area of your business likely needs improved efficiencies. If you manage a mid-sized firm or are scaling up to become one, efficiency is the top priority. You can’t deliver services at scale using manual processes. Cost pressures and regulations could hit you hard anytime and staffing is a wild card.

Inflation, staff and skill shortages, competition, high taxes, more doors and tenants to service, writing off some defaults, and an inability to cover expenses by raising rents, means the pressure really is on to upgrade and automate.

Getting Out of Your Own Way

Business people need to get out of the way of their company’s success. Many owners, managers and even staff themselves get in the way of the solutions they need.

If other growing property management firms are ceding to automation technology en masse, then it’s clear, your time is now too.

Benefits of Progressing

• lower workloads for staff
• less experience and technical knowledge needed (accounting)
• brand boost for your company (your UVP)
• greater client confidence in your firm
• lowered operations costs
• lower maintenance, marketing, admin, expenses and more
• brings your company in sync with the marketplace
• helps you discover new business models and revenue sources
• raises profitability
• increases regulator compliance
• software manages the upgrades and improves uptime
• allows you to scale up anyway you want to

What’s Holding Managers Back from Achieving Efficiencies?

In general, property managers and mid-sized rental property companies suffer higher costs when anything has to be done manually.  Doing things better just looks like another expense.

An untimely repair, single rent payments taken at the office, a cleaning and showing of a vacant unit, phone call from an upset tenant, unfinished repair, accepting rental applications and doing background checks, or performing manual data entry all create drag on operations.

And it’s all connected. If operations is disjointed, then other areas like accounting become affected.

What’s Preventing Adoption Right Now?

The manager’s big list of procrastinations:

• time it takes to move to a new property management software
• reluctance to leave the comfort zone and what’s still working
• belief that accounting will get all messed up
• dislikes all this fancy tech lingo
• belief that upgrading will raise costs such as software, subscriptions, training, troubleshooting, using new features as well as unneeded features (unused bells & whistles)
• will only change when it’s a crisis at hand
• data incompatibility
• doubt that automation will make much difference to performance
• no system for estimating performance gains or forecasting revenue/expenses
• a fear of mysterious, cloud-based, SaaS digital technology (how can I use it if I don’t understand it?)
• inability to integrate with existing legacy technologies used (old accounting software, banking, spreadsheets, word processing, email)
• staff are already burned out, how can I ask them to learn a new system?
• fear of becoming trapped in a big vendor’s system of solutions, pricing, and partners
• aren’t convinced their current pains and costs are truly significant (not enough pain yet)
• believing automation means laying off staff (they just go upstream)

Use some New Calculations (because the Usual Ones Aren’t Working for You)

Calculate future performance vs your current performance.

To get yourself past inertia, you may want to calculate the cost of old school processes against the potential of reorganizing staff, eliminating work, allowing new property growth, and creating more ways to draw revenue. Do the comparison, and all of a sudden there’s urgency.

Instead of your old general financial stats (income statements, rent roll, accounts payable), just look at key cost and revenue numbers and how they’re trending:

• review your top costs and how they’re trending in the last 6 months
• recalculate finance/mortgage costs at projected rates for July 2023
• project your current costs/expenses/liabilities right now out for full year 2023
• project your incoming rent revenue for the next 12 months
• calculate your property taxes, insurance and income taxes for next year
• calculate property depreciation rate for 2023
• calculate your vacancy and turnover costs for the last 3 months, and for the April to June period
• calculate your marginal profit for the next 12 months
• examine your 2019 ROI (everything is returning to prepandemic levels)
• review your tenant demographics vs 10 years ago

Try out the rental property calculator at OmniCalculator for quick financial insights.

The key to overcoming inertia and procrastination is to generate a new perspective. As long as you’re trapped in the old view, there is little that will change your mind.

The fact most landlords keep saying efficiency, growth, profitability and technology are their top goals every year, tells you they’re not getting there.

Talk to Our Product Specialists

Take a good look at ManageCasa and solve your pressing management and business issues with our sales team. They’re better able to communicate how effective ManageCasa’s platform will be for your company.

Considering attending property management conferences in 2023? Visit us at the upcoming Apartmentalize 2023 event in Atlanta.

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