Landlords Embrace Innovation: Explore the Leading Apps for Real Estate Management

Surrey remains among the most competitive areas in England for landlords to operate, thanks to its huge commuter opportunity and competition for properties. To thrive in the area, attract new and maintain current tenants, Weybridge landlords must innovate and maximise their use of technology to market their property portfolio and keep existing customers happy. 

Landlords Facing Changes in the To-Let Market

Landlords are typically always busy. On the hunt for new properties, maintaining existing locations, and trying to anticipate market changes. They also face a changing landscape, like the incoming EPC regulations that will change the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards for rental properties to the C-band category by the end of 2025. There’s also the ongoing government-led discussions about further changes. 

Among all that effort, landlords must try to run their business in a time and cash-flow-efficient manner to cope with the demands of prospects and tenants. Many still rely on folders full of paperwork, in- and out-trays, and a humming phone line to keep their operations moving. Multiply that by dozens of landlords in and around Weybridge, and there’s a lot of admin going on, amid constant competition for prospective residents with fast-changing desires and needs. 

Going Digital Can Boost Landlord Speed and Efficiency

Landlord property software is a niche but growing segment of the productivity application market. These cloud-based services help move all that paperwork into one set of clear-to-understand screens, with automatic alerts about deadlines, making dealing with properties and tenants faster. 

They typically provide leasing administration management, property maintenance schedules, credit, service charge, and payment control, with some providing appointment management and accounting tools to keep everything within the one application. 

If not, there are plenty of accountants happy to support your business, making tax digital for landlords, taking a lot of the effort out of your hands, while keeping you up to date on liabilities and opportunities to benefit from changing taxation regimes. 

Behind the Technology Jargon Door for Landlords

For the non-technical landlord, “cloud” means the data is stored on a secure and backed-up server typically in a near-by data centre. They are managed by your provider, so you can access your information from your smartphone or computer, anytime. Most services have 24/7 service and promise 99.9% uptime, with any scheduled downtime typically performed on weekend nights, and unscheduled outages resolved promptly thanks to redundant storage and servers.

Another term, software-as-a-service (SaaS), means you pay a monthly fee for access to these applications, rather than the huge fees that developers used to charge for their software. SaaS software is always kept up to date, with bugs and vulnerabilities fixed live, new features added all the time as the market needs them, and most firms are highly responsive to their customers’ needs.  

Manchester Accountants A&L say, “Another common feature is application integration, or application program interface (API) where your new landlord software can work with your existing tax software or a database to copy information over, and other tools you may already use.” 

The Benefits of Landlord Applications

For startup landlords, working with SaaS tools reduces the headaches and overheads of manual effort or working with generic software like spreadsheets that are not designed with your business in mind. Whatever the size of your landlord operation, in terms of business operations, they make:

  • Managing your time showing properties (or your team’s if you have a larger business)
  • Collecting and managing rent simpler
  • Automating your tenant communications, freeing up your phone to talk to prospects to grow the business or trades to deal with maintenance issues. 
  • Handling the changes in compliance, energy efficiency and other mandatory tasks,
  • Automatically screen tenants through smart software background and credit checks. 

And all of this software supports your business, scaling as your portfolio grows and you hire more workers who can access the information easily. All for a reasonable SaaS charge that typically only changes a modest amount as your business scales up. 

Landlords Can Spread their Net With Online Marketing 

The rental sector still thrives on newspaper adverts, that have spread online, or through rental sites that harvest adverts from many landlords. To stand out, landlords can innovate using technology and build their own brand online using third-party social media and sites like YouTube and TikTok to appeal to prospective tenants who are more interested in a first-person walkthrough than static images. 

Brand building is how small firms get large, like OpenRent, and stand out from competition in the local area, like Weybridge and the surrounding towns. Marketing is more than a smart logo, but presenting the business as one for the modern renter, with a fast-moving portfolio, and dealing quickly and professionally with any issues to generate a satisfied customer base. 

Conclusion

Put the right software and tools in your business, and no matter how small the company, you can appear and function like a powerful and fast-moving brand that will appeal to clients, trades supporting your properties, and those in the buy-to-let market who will be more willing to provide tips and work with your business on a regular basis.