Three Areas Where You Can Accelerate Property Management Operations

Leasing and front-office operations are a huge focus of the multifamily business. Understandably so: Attracting qualified residents takes a lot of time and effort.

As a result, property management operations get short shrift. What are leasing activities but the pathway for a prospect to become a resident? More importantly, a resident who could live at your community for years will need (and expect) great service throughout that time. And in today’s market, it’s crucial to retain residents.

This is where the latest property management operations solutions come in. Let’s explore three areas where multifamily innovations can help exceed customer expectations, gain revenue efficiency, and keep properties up and running.

1. The resident experience.

Rent growth in 2023 was well below average. And with the abundant supply of apartments coming onto the market, renters have more options for a new home than ever. At the same time, there’s also increased downward pressure on rent growth and a surge in expenses. As a result, multifamily companies are looking to drive more efficiencies without sacrificing resident satisfaction.  Here are a few ways tech can take over manual property management operations tasks that impact the resident experience:

Month-end close

OneSite’s bulk month-end close enables users to conduct the month-end close process in bulk across all properties, reducing the time to close per property from seven minutes on average to just 30 seconds. This speeds up and simplifies the move-out process for both properties and residents. For Danielle Rivers, Director of Business Services at Camden, bulk month-end close helped their teams close books for the month for their entire portfolio within two to three hours. 

Letters and notices

Recurring accounts receivable letters and notices are time-consuming, even though they require the same few steps for each letter. Multiply that across a portfolio and there’s an opportunity to simplify this work through self-service configuration automation. With OneSite’s letters and notices feature, users can automate and configure the various letters and notices that are required for properties, reducing the chances that residents miss important communications. 

Digital disbursement  Digital disbursement solutions help eliminate paper checks and petty cash issues for multifamily companies and residents. RealPage® offers three digital disbursement solutions: Instant deposit refunds, which allow residents to obtain their refund digitally; a utility reimbursement debit card, which replaces paper checks with reloadable debit cards for monthly utility reimbursements; and petty cash prepaid cards, which can be issued to property staff to cover ad-hoc surprise expenses, which are then recorded, coded and reportable.

2. Employee satisfaction and efficiency.

Centralization isn’t just beneficial for the front office — it can also be a game-changer for your property management operations staff. By consolidating and automating work across multiple properties, centralization solutions can make your teams’ jobs easier. It can also enable them to pick up where someone else left off, addressing the unfortunately common challenge of high turnover rates in the multifamily industry. Let’s dig into two property management operations areas that you might not know benefit from centralized solutions: 

Move-out/Final Account Statements (FAS)Paired with OneSite’s bulk month-end close tool (which we discussed above) is our move-out/multiproperty FAS views feature. With move-out/FAS, you see the real-time visibility for your entire portfolio in one centralized dashboard, eliminating the need to click into each property. You're able to see not only the final account statements but also the move-out inspection, ledgers and related documents. The result? You can reduce resident move-out/FAS time from 30 minutes to an average of five minutes. 

Spend managementTo battle rising costs and increasing competition, multifamily operators are doing much more with much less. One way to do that is to embrace a source-to-pay strategy using technology from RealPage.  Centralizing your property spend with a tool like RealPage’s Source to Pay software comes with a number of benefits. With fully integrated across purchasing, invoicing and vendor engagement, it’s the key to lowering operating costs, reducing expenses and increasing NOI. You get timely and actionable insights across your entire portfolio through centralization automation along the entire purchasing journey. 

3. Vendor management.

Vendor management is another area where you can find major efficiency gains and savings through property management operations innovations. The right vendor solutions can decrease risk and improve your vendor relations. They can also reduce redundancy by enabling you to quickly identify existing options rather than starting from scratch with each new project; if you already have a great electrician on board, why would you want to look for someone new? Here are the top tools to optimize your vendor management operations:             

Mobile app for vendorsVendors are constantly on the go. And since mobile technology is a way of life for most people, introducing that into your relationship with the vendor no longer falls under the “nice to have” category but the necessities. RealPage developed a mobile solution just for vendors, allowing them to view serviced properties, check statuses and upload documents. 

Vendor credentialingManaging the various insurance certificates, W-9s and important documents for all the vendors across your portfolio can be costly and time-intensive. Missteps and errors can add up to increasing expenses, risk and fraud. Solutions like RealPage Vendor Credentialing give you real-time visibility into vendor insurance and liability coverage for all your properties, accessible in one user-friendly dashboard. It also notifies you when a vendor’s coverage is about to expire and approves them before your next project begins. 

Last-minute vendor approvalsWhat do you do when you need an emergency plumber at 3 am? Would you take the risk that they might not meet compliance requirements? Our Credential Key Program gives you peace of mind by streamlining the process of approving new vendors. Vendors can reach approved status in as little as 15 minutes while meeting 100% of your certification requirements.

Transform your property management operations

Through innovative solutions like these, it’s easier than ever to optimize your property management operations, create a competitive advantage and uncover hidden opportunities to scale your investments.

With OneSite® Property Management from RealPage, users can leverage automated features to help achieve an 83% improvement in time efficiency on average and create a smoother resident experience.

Learn more about RealPage’s property management operations solutions.

Want to take a deep dive into the future of property management operations? Watch the on-demand recording of our Innovation Day webcast to hear from some of the brightest minds in the industry. They outline key challenges, describe relevant data and share measurable outcomes.

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