PROPERTY STRATEGY BLOG

PART 3 of 7: SYSTEMS

You’ve made the decision to take that leap and bring your lettings in-house, brilliant! But what do you need to have in place to ensure everything runs as smoothly as possible?  There are a few things you are going to need to consider and put in place before you start, the first being . . .

SYSTEMS!

Before you consider taking lettings in-house you should be confident that you have clear set systems within your business already. 

It can be a pretty mammoth task to start self-managing so if the rest of your business isn’t running smoothly, lettings will just make it all chaotic.  Assuming you have the other areas of your business in order, here are the integral systems you will need to introduce for your lettings:

1. Tenant management software: we decided to use Arthur which is fantastic but there are a lot of other similar systems out there so do your research and decide what will work best for you.  It does take a lot of headspace to set something like this up, we had the wonderful Lizzie to put all her time and energy into learning and setting this up and it took a number of months.

2. Financial management: so you are able to monitor rents / voids / arrears effectively, if you don’t already, you should also have software such as Xero or Quickbooks to help you with this.  It is also worth checking that it can integrate with you tenant management software, this isn’t necessarily a requirement, but it can really help with reconciliation.

3. Task management: if you haven’t already got a task management system in place, we’d really recommend you do so before taking on lettings and get used to using it for the other areas of your business first.  You will have seen me suggest Asana before which is our personal preference, for lettings we have projects set up for:

·        Arrears

·        Tenant notice / departures

·        Tenant finds

·        Maintenance

Although your management software is likely to help you cover these areas, we find using Asana is integral to helping us keeping a clear view across all of these areas and it also means the team are able to communicate with each other around specific tasks which we’ve found we aren’t able to do easily within our management software.

It will probably take some time to get used to these new systems and it may not be as slick as you want it to be at first, but what we found really helped us with this was just taking on a couple of properties first so we had the time to iron out any issues we were coming across.  I think had we taken everything on in one go it would have been pretty overwhelmed.

You’ll also need to make sure you have the right team behind you to help implement all of this, watch out for another post I’ll be sharing which will cover everything you need to know about this!

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