Operating a real estate business is no trivial affair. There are numerous moving parts to balance while still maintaining your sanity. Time is precious. Treat it wisely and strive to eliminate inefficiencies wherever possible. This is essential if you want to grow your business, and it will affect everything from whom and how you hire, what technology you implement, and how you strategize overall.
Industry practices
The first step is becoming well-informed on industry best practices. There’s a lot going on in the real estate and property management fields. Things are changing with each passing day. Erin Eberlin at The Balance wrote a salient article highlighting five common landlord mistakes to avoid. You should start there to make sure all of your bases are covered. She begins with encouraging landlord to have the right types of insurance coverage and the proper amounts of coverage, too. You’d be surprised just how many landlords fall prey to such a simple error that can have such catastrophic consequences in the worst-case scenarios. You’ll really have to consider each property separately when it comes to working on her checklist.
You can find similar resources elsewhere, too. Erin’s roster of key takeaways was echoed and expanded upon by Zoe Dare Hall at The Telegraph. Those perspectives should serve you well when it comes to assessing the condition of your different properties. Financial directors like Lincoln Frost, with expertise in real-estate development and financing should be considered as well.
Use a property management company
Something to consider is retaining a property management company instead of managing a workforce yourself. Unless you relish every chance to do it yourself when it comes to daily duties, there’s a lot to potentially gain from outsourcing the work to a property management company. Staff writers at Do It Yourself explain the basic pros and cons associated with a property management company. The only real disadvantage they cite is sacrificing some fraction of your profits. Another factor you’d have to consider is what to do with your existing workforce if you went with a property management company? You’d ultimately have to disband the group–but you might hold sincere reservations with that approach, and understandably so.
Software
Another sound strategy is investing in landlord software. While technology enablement won’t necessarily cure all business ailments, it can certainly go a long way to addressing some of the issues you’d frequently face. For instance, most software solutions let administrators advertise rental properties for free and process online applications with ease. You also get access to vast amounts of valuable customer and prospect data, which you can then utilize to inform your future efforts.
