Are any of your companies centralizing your onsite responsibilities?

I am researching ways to centralize onsite responsibilities company-wide. For example, processing all rent in a central location. Are any of your companies centralizing your onsite responsibilities? What are you doing and how is it working out?

Can you give more examples of what you’re trying to centralize

We're essentially trying to think of any way to save the onsite team time. Other examples would be Parcel Pending lockers for packages, mobile maintenance via tablets for the service team, Level One for leasing calls, etc. We already do those things, and are trying to think of other ways that we can take tasks off our plate, or streamline them so they take less time.

Two big ones would be smart home technology to eliminate keys and control thermostat remotely. Huge savings in hard and soft dollars. Second would be outbound call center like Touchpoint365. There’s no alternative today and ROI is insane. It’s Level”Ten” compared to Level”One”

a good way to centralize payment processing and releive onsite staff of the headache/hassle is draft only payments. Auto or one time online only payments. And for those residents that cannot swing a bank account to set up online payments there is always the W.I.P.S payment system.

This is actually one of the ideas we have seriously thought about. It's 2018; I personally think it should be fine to require online payments exclusively. What software do you use? Do you get pushback from residents? Does it create a problem with roommates who each want to pay only a portion of the total?

I would love to centralize our invoices/AP. Have someobe in our home office take that off our sites plate. Wenuse Ios and its just very time consuming for our managers

We have 19 properties in Ohio and all checks are mailed to Corp office to be scanned there or ach. No rent collection on site unless rent is late. Easier to have central office than deal with that individually. Same with our 2 other states offices. Properties then concentrate on leasing and servicing residents.

We have all payments sent to our Corp office for processing. We also do all Account Payable from our Corporate Office as well as marketing for all of our properties. The only marketing our on-site staff has to do is post a couple Craigslist Ads twice a week. Another thing we take off their plate is budgeting. This is all done from corporate as well but we also own all of our properties and don't do fee-based management so this may not be possible for companies that have different properties owned by different owners. We really want our on-site staff's focus to be on existing and prospective residents and not worry as much about the other things.

Online leasing, virtual tours, automatic payments, centralized internet with smart homes that can open doors for prospects to tour themselves once they’ve filled out all the required forms, online service request, automatic website posting, outside vendors providing events, door-to-door trash service, etc. Come to think of it, why do you even need an office staff? The property could essentially be ran on almost an entirely service base staff.

All jokes aside, this is the direction we’re heading. Eventually much of the service can be either outsourced or mechanized. The real question is not can it be done to relieve pressure on site staff, the real question is do we really want to remove the human factor in it all? It might all make sense monetarily and efficiency wise but does it make sense to the bigger picture of having people’s dwellings feel like a home or a cubicle.