As everyone knows, the property management industry is constantly shifting and evolving to accommodate new technologies helping to make the lives of property managers a lot easier. Over the last few years, leasing automation has quickly become one of the most valuable additions to the industry, specifically within the multi-family community. 

For those who haven’t yet experienced true leasing automation, it gives your prospective residents what they want - real-time responses and tour scheduling at their convenience. It gives your leasing staff what they need - dramatically less time on the phone and responding to e-mails, tours efficiently scheduled based on their real availability, and high-touch automated follow-ups throughout the leasing process. Multi-family property managers wear so many hats that the more time that can be saved, the better. Leasing automation is re-envisioning how prospects and management companies interact and it’s time to get on board.

It is important to understand that not every company that offers what they consider to be “leasing automation” actually has true end-to-end leasing automation. True end-to-end leasing automation doesn’t need to be regularly touched or fed information. A fully automated platform empowers the individual prospect to self-conduct the entire leasing process within constraints and guidelines pre-set by the property manager or owner. On the management side, a fully automated platform allows for tremendous cost savings, serious growth without additional staff, a significantly better experience for prospective renters, reduced on-market times, and a happier leasing staff who is more likely to stay with the company. Doesn’t that sound like an enjoyable experience for everybody involved?

There are some important things to keep an eye out for when trying to find a true leasing automation solution for your company. Customization is a critical way of ensuring that your automated touch-points are operating in a way that reflects exactly how your company wants to do business. Through custom pre-screening questions and automated communication with prospects, your solution should offer the ability for you to handpick exactly how you want to communicate with prospective renters. No two property management companies are the same, an automated solution should have the flexibility to account for how you choose to run your business.

Another very important feature to look at is true calendar integration. Being able to have scheduled tours automatically populate on your personal calendar is something that every property manager needs, because why take an extra step when you don’t need to? With all of these features and capabilities comes an accumulation of a lot of information, which makes having advanced reporting features a necessity as well. Being able to view the history of a lead, as well as the original source of the inquiry, is imperative towards understanding the best ways to market your vacancies. Reporting functionality is a very powerful tool to understand the successes and potential shortcomings of your business, as well as, seeing the bigger picture to keep your processes efficient.

Going beyond the ability to allow prospects to control the pre-leasing process is allowing them to actually do the tours themselves. A true leasing automation platform will also have the ability for you to get access to digital access devices that you can install directly into the door of each unit. Not only is this good for prospects touring the unit, but it’s also extremely beneficial to allow residents to have digital access to their own units and be able to generate their own access codes to give out to their visitors. These are the types of benefits that keep residents happy and makes it that much easier for them to renew their lease when that time comes.

Leasing automation is an extremely valuable tool within the multi-family industry and it is only going to get more important as time goes on. Property managers consistently have more and more responsibilities added to their plate, so finding ways to make their lives easier and more efficient is the difference-maker in gaining and retaining talent within your team.