Many people believe that being a landlord is an easy way to generate a constant passive stream of income, but this is not the case. The reality is that being a successful landlord is a full-time job that includes: (1) ensuring that rent is collected on time, (2) ensuring that your have reliable tenants filling vacancies, and (3) ensuring that maintenance is performed within a reasonable amount of time.
Luckily, we leave in an era of technological innovation, and some of these innovations can make a landlord’s job easier.
(1) Online Background Checks and Online Housing Applications
In an era where nearly everyone has internet access, it is mind-boggling that some landlords still require would-be tenants to show up and fill out applications for tenancy. There are a number of applications and several type of applications that allow a landlord to accept housing applications and conduct credit checks quickly.
(2) Digital Signatures
Keeping in line with streamlining the process and avoiding the need of taking time out of your day to be physically present and meet tenants for signatures, technology has allowed landlords to accept digital signatures on a large variety of documents; making the landlord’s job significantly less time-consuming.
(3) Electronic Rent Payment
The most common issue for landlord’s is obtaining rent in a timely fashion, and then processing that rent before their expenses come due. As a landlord it would be prudent to set up an online payment method, which could also be set up to automatically transfer funds on a given day. Again, reducing the amount of time a landlord must spend to adequately perform their job is a massive benefit.
(4) Internet-Based Maintenance Requests
Generally speaking, tenants want things repaired quickly and frequently bombard the landlord with texts and calls until things are fixed. Allowing tenants to make maintenance requests through the internet is an effective method of reducing the headache associated with fulfilling maintenance requests as well as streamlining the process.
(5) Smart Thermostats
Many landlords provide utilities as an incentive to fill vacancies quickly, which is an incredibly effective technique. However, it may not be cost-effective without modern technologies to assist in keeping the use of utilities reasonable. Using smart thermostats is an excellent way to keep costs down.
At the Chernov Team we understand that technology and innovation, when used right, exist to make our lives easier; this is true in all facets of life including performing your duties as a landlord. At the end of the day, time is money – if you can reduce the amount of time you spend dealing with simple things you are free to focus on maximizing your profits.