So Much to Do, So Little Time How Technology Can Help You Become More Efficient by
Lon Bencini, MinuteBids
Maintaining important documents and conducting inspections on rental properties, apartment buildings, and homes is crucial for property management companies of any size, big or small, and it can be difficult to manage this process. Property managers can now use their mobile devices to help them manage their properties, saving them time when doing their regular inspections, checking on projects and capturing data while on the go.
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re you feeling the pressure? You’re not alone. In an increasingly competitive real estate market we’re all doing a lot more, managing more properties and working longer hours. There are solutions. Technologies are now available help us become more efficient when dealing with our day-to-day tasks. These technologies can allow more time to spend with our customers while improving our bottom line at the same time and maybe, even spend a bit more quality time with our families. We need to take advantage of the new stuff out there; here are a couple of technologies that we’ve used and that you should consider to help better manage your time.
Mobile Applications Mobile technology is changing the property management business. From sales to maintenance and everything in between, there are mobile applications for your smart phone and tablets to manage all of it.
The growth of mobile usage is phenomenal. In 2011, mobile traffic was 12 times the total internet traffic generated in 2000 and it’s estimated that there will be 10 billion connected mobile devices by 2017. Most consumers are using their mobile devices to find apartments, condominiums and townhomes. In 2012, ninety percent of consumers began their search on the web, according to a study by National Association of Realtors, and more than 80% are accessing this information on their smart phones and tablets, according to the California Association of Realtors. These are huge trends. Today, many property management companies are allowing their managers to do more on their smart phones. Many are using them to make notes and snap pictures of their properties, make payments, map directions to meetings, communicate with their team and other important applications. It’s amazing, but today all of this is possible on smart mobile devices.
There are many property inspection applications available for your smart phone and tablet, though they can be expensive. Here at MinuteBids, we’ve just launched a free mobile application that property managers and management companies can use on the iPhones or iPads they already have, to inspect properties using touch check boxes, auto text comments, and photos to create an organized professional report. This report can then be accessed anywhere online when they need to view, print, or email the report directly to the property owner on the spot. Property reports take very little time when done from the property being inspected.
Local Information The amount of information on the internet is beyond our abilities to access it. The amount of data stored in the cloud is now measured in zettabytes, sounds big. The amount of data we can access is something less than that but still an inconceivable amount of information. While the internet has made a lot of what we do more efficient, finding the right answer is not always made easier. For example, I just did a Google search for roofers in Minneapolis and got 1,160,000 results. I know it’s not very helpful but easier than what we’ve done in the past.
So Much to Do continued on page 30 November | December 2013
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