Best Property Management Automation Tools
Need The Best Property Management Automation Tools in 2024?
Need The Best Property Management Automation Tools in 2024? Look no further than
Property managers are notoriously busy and always have a million different tasks on their to-do lists, which is why property management automation tools can be so useful.
These tools can reduce the administrative burdens of repetitive, manual tasks and make sure that no small details are forgotten—not to mention free up time to focus on growing your business.
Here’s a look at the specific ways that property management automation can support your business along with eight of the top software options on the market in 2024.
What Is Property Management Automation?
At its core, property management automation encompasses the various tools and workflows you can put in place to complete property management tasks with minimal intervention from your team.
Property managers can benefit from automation in two distinct ways. On the one hand, it can save you time, effort, and money because you use it to streamline operations and simplify workflows. It basically frees you from dealing with repetitive tasks on a daily basis, allowing you to focus on bigger-picture projects like growing your portfolio.
On the other hand, automation can also help you satisfy increasingly tech-savvy tenants and owners.
2024 Property Management Industry Report
2024 Property Management Industry Report found that 90% of the residents surveyed would prefer to handle leasing online. Automating part of the leasing process gives tenants a more straightforward, immediately responsive experience, through the digital channels that they prefer.
Best Tasks to Automate with Property Management Tools
If you’re new to property management automation, you may want to know which tasks on your daily to-do list can be made easier with technology. Here are a few common property management tasks that benefit the most from automation:
Rent Collection and Processing
The right property management automation software can speed up and simplify the rent collection process. It’s possible to automate invoicing, as well as to send automatic reminders for payment. At the same time, you can also enable payment portals for tenants, which make it easy to collect online rent payments.
Not only does automating rent collection streamline the payment process and reduce the amount of work that you have to do on a monthly basis, but it also has many other benefits. For example, automation reduces the likelihood of missed payments and minimizes manual errors.
Maintenance Requests and Management
Some property management software will also let you automate maintenance requests. On the front end, this makes it easier to track any maintenance requests that have been submitted by tenants. It also makes it easier to streamline the management process behind the scenes.
You’ll have the ability to notify your maintenance crew immediately when there is a problem, automatically assign tickets to individual crew members, and receive notifications whenever an open maintenance request has been completed.
Lease Management
Automation tools can also help streamline lease administration. You can use property management software to create leases quickly, automatically share updates and important documents with tenants throughout the application process, collect electronic signatures, send renewal reminders, and assist with termination processes. Plus, document storage and retrieval tools will enable you to store and call up important documents related to each lease at any time.
These tools create a better leasing experience for your business while reducing the administrative burdens on your team.
Tenant Screening
Property management automation software also makes sure tenant screening is both thorough and fast. You can use it to send qualified candidates to your online rental application, facilitate the background check and credit check, and score or rank candidates for tenant selection.
These advances will streamline your tenant selection process by enabling you to quickly identify suitable candidates. Over time, automation tools will help you reduce the risks of accepting problematic leases—and all their potential costs.
Financial Management and Accounting
Financial management and business accounting are two of the most important tasks any property manager will face. But, you don’t have to tackle them alone. These days, you can integrate other property management tools into your existing accounting software or opt for purpose-built software property management software with powerful, industry specific tools already built in. This latter option offers greater ROI and the most potential for automation.
The same goes for financial reporting tools. Property management software with built-in reporting and analytics features puts all your numbers in one place, simplifying financial management, giving you better financial oversight, and supporting smarter business decisions.
Listing and Marketing Units
Property management automation can also make it easier to list and market the properties in your portfolio. Rental listing syndication features let you automatically list vacancies on multiple rental platforms with the click of a button.
Automatically schedule and coordinate showings
Once listed, other tools can automatically schedule and coordinate showings for your property and push prospects toward the application process. These solutions often store details on your marketing efforts, so you can adapt your strategy and improve your occupancy rates over time.
Property Inspections
Automation can take the guesswork out of routine property inspections. Similar to showings, you can use purpose-built tools to schedule the inspections, create digital inspection checklists (to ensure nothing slips through the cracks), send out inspection reports, and follow up on any issues.
Data Analytics and Reporting
Finally, automation can help you gather valuable property management data, then analyze that data and create custom reports in just a few clicks. This makes it easier to stay on top of your own business’s health and share important details with owners. Customizable dashboards even help automate the sharing process, letting owners and team members access the up-to-date data they need in real time.
The Best Property Management Automation Tools in 2024
All these benefits may sound appealing, but you may be asking yourself if you’ll need to put forth a lot of effort and investment up front, finding the right tools for each part of your business you want to automate.
The answer, thankfully, is no.
We put together a list of eight types of software solutions with useful, easy to implement automation features, starting with the solutions that cover the most tasks, then diving into tools with a narrower focus.
1:Our Top Picks All-in-One Software for Property Management Automation List
Find a is a comprehensive property management software solution. It must have the capacity to automate tasks across all aspects of your property management business, from marketing and leasing to accounting, maintenance, and beyond. It’s also software that’s designed to scale with your business, so it’s well-suited for those with small and large door counts alike.
Features
As mentioned above, Buildium offers a robust suite of features that are geared toward property management automation, including:
- Online rent collection: Residents can add their bank accounts and credit cards to the online resident center, making it easy to collect payments and send reminders.
- Maintenance requests: Residents and owners can submit maintenance requests, attach photos and videos, and get status updates. You can track how effectively your vendors perform.
- Managing leases: Save time with leasing templates and collect signatures safely online.
- Tenant screening: Access full credit, background, and eviction data while also getting recommendations on each potential tenant, based on the data collected.
- Marketing listings: Rental listing syndication makes it easy to advertise your available listings on all the major sites.
- Property accounting: Reconcile your bank accounts automatically to ensure you never miss a record.
- Data analysis: The Analytics Hub shows you how you stack up against local industry benchmarks so that you can make informed decisions on how to move forward.
Buildium also includes an open API, enabling an even deeper level of customization and automated workflows, along with a growing ecosystem of Marketplace partners—including several of the tools further down in this list—to meet all your specific needs.
Pricing
Buildium offers three different pricing tiers, but all plans include these capabilities:
- Accounting
- Maintenance
- Task Management
- Violations
- Online Portals
- Resident & Board Member Communications
The pricing tiers are designed to help you scale your business, by allowing you to choose the capabilities that suit your needs:
- Essential: Starts at $55/month and includes Buildium’s core features, including a property management website and tenant screening tools
- Growth: Starts at $174/month and includes unlimited e-signatures, performance, and business analytics, as well as live phone support
- Premium: Starts at $375/month for property managers who are focused on growth, including access to the open API, onboarding support, and assistance from a dedicated growth consultant
#2: Propertyware
Fully Customizable Software to Automate Several Property Management Tasks
Propertyware® has many strengths as a property management software platform—but its key benefit is that it’s almost fully customizable. This makes Propertyware a good fit for those who have larger door counts or multiple properties with unique needs.
Features
Propertyware also offers many automation-forward features, including:
- Online payments: This online payment system can decrease rent processing times by up to 40%.
- Maintenance tracking: This feature allows you to dispatch vendors, track time and expenses, and invoice tenants or owners from a central location.
- Leasing application portal: Give potential tenants an online portal for their leasing experience and invest in a workflow that helps guide them through finishing their application.
- Tenant screening: The software’s AI-enabled screening technology clues you in on a prospect’s ability and willingness to pay.
- Property accounting: The software’s accounts receivable tool tracks payments for you so you don’t have to.
Pricing
Propertyware also offers three pricing options, starting with a flat fee per unit and a minimum monthly spend.
Each tier comes with the following, among other features:
- Custom reporting
- Marketing
- Property management
- Online portals
Its pricing tiers look like this:
- Basic: At $1.00 per unit, per month, the Basic plan covers maintenance and accounting features, tenant screening and rent collection capabilities, plus unlimited training and support.
- Plus: At $1.50 per unit, per month, the Plus plan includes all the services in the Basic plan, plus two-way text messaging, e-signatures, and access to the platform’s property inspection app.
- Premium: At $2.00 per unit, per month, the Premium plan includes all of the features in the other two plans in addition to maintenance project organization and online vendor portals
#3: PropUp
A Service to Manage Vacancies from Move-Out to Move-In
When you’re looking to automate the unit turnover process, look no further than PropUp®. This software offers an automated workflow system and inspection-ready mobile app to allow you to stop using countless spreadsheet trackers and to help keep your renovation timelines from falling through the cracks.
Features
PropUp offers several features that allow you to automate tasks, including:
- Unit turnover workflows: Automatically assign team members to spearhead each step of the process
- Task tracking: Track your team members’ progress in real time
- Mobile app inspections: Create compressive checklists to make inspections easier and take pictures on the go
- Maintenance and repairs: Unit turnover tasks, maintenance requests, and capital projects can all be monitored in Propup’s interface
- Custom board design: Ditch your whiteboard for a digital version that can be continuously updated with PropUp’s data.
Pricing
Propup’s pricing strategy is fairly simple. Instead of making its consumers select from pricing tiers or pick-and-choose features, it offers all of its capabilities for a reasonable fee of just $1/unit.
#4: Clyr
Property Management Automation Software to Handle Expenses
If you’re looking for a better way to organize your expenses, check out Clyr®. This tool uses automation to help save you time when capturing and coding receipts, paying bills, managing invoices, and tracking job costs.
Features
Clyr offers its users three main features:
- Real-time receipt capture: Users can submit receipts via SMS, email, or web. Then, Clyr automatically extracts data from the receipt to categorize and code it for you.
- Automated bill pay: Use rule-based payment approvals to ensure that your automated payments stay in line with company policies.
- Profitability analysis: After tracking project expense with Clyr’s job-costing tools, its analytics can provide you with actionable insights on the best way to move forward.
Pricing
Clyr doesn’t list its pricing information on its website. However, it does offer a free demo of the service.
#5: ShowingHero
A Tailored Solution to Automate Showings
Ready to make showing available properties simpler? ShowingHero® can automatically schedule showings, follow up with leads, pre-screen prospects, and gather feedback from showings, so that you can free up more time in your schedule.
Features
ShowingHero offers plenty of useful features to help automate the showing process, such as:
- Import listings: ShowingHero can automatically import and update your listings based on information stored in a property management software solution, like Buildium.
- Smart agent scheduling: The rule-based calendar system allows ShowingHero to schedule showings for you while taking your availability into account.
- Pre-screen prospects: This software allows you to ask pre-screening questions, so that only qualified prospects can schedule a showing.
- 24/7 lead nurturing: ShowingHero responds to every lead for you and sends out automated reminders to get your prospect in the door.
- Self-tours: SMART lockboxes with one-time-use codes give potential tenants the ability to tour properties themselves.
Pricing
ShowingHero offers a tiered pricing system, based on the anticipated number of active listings you’ll have per month. This is how the structure breaks down:
- Starter: $26/listing, with a minimum of 4 listings per month
- Pro: $23/listing, with a minimum of 15 listings per month
- Star: $20/listing, with a minimum of 35 listings per month
- Superhero: $17/listing, with a minimum of 50 listings per month
- Enterprise: $14/listing, with a minimum of 100 listings per month
#6: Tenant Turner
Leasing Automation Software to Find New Tenants
Those who need to find qualified tenants to fill their properties should take a look at Tenant Turner®. This software uses automation to simplify the tenant search process and makes it easy to find your next qualified lead.
Features
Tenant Turner has many of the same automation features as ShowingHero, including the ability to import listing information, ask pre-screening questions, and send automated showing reminders and feedback requests. However, it also has a few unique features that set it apart, including:
- Application link: Automatically send application links out to prospective tenants following their showing
- Wait list: Delay showings while you build a shortlist of qualified candidates
- Set Alerts: Get alerted when a listing or prospective tenant needs your attention
Pricing
Tenant Turner breaks down its pricing by feature. Here’s a closer look at what to expect:
- Scheduling software and automated phone system: $1.20/month, per unit
- Electronic lockbox: $90-$175/per lockbox, depending on type, plus $5 monthly fee
- Electronic lock: $175, plus $5 monthly fee per lock
- Call center: $100 for first 50 minutes, plus $0.95 per each additional minute
#7: PropertyMeld
Property Management Automation for Maintenance Tasks
PropertyMeld® helps streamline maintenance coordination by connecting property managers, residents, vendors, and property owners all in one place. It offers automated workflows, smart responses, and a centralized scheduling tool to make closing work orders a snap.
Features
PropertyMeld’s features include:
- Automated scheduling: PropertyMeld allows property managers to track segmented cycle times to see where bottlenecks occur
- Streamlined communication: AI communication tools ensure that your tenants receive a response to their requests right away
- Oversight and data: Comprehensive data collection enables you to make strategic decisions
Pricing
PropertyMeld doesn’t list its pricing on its website. However, the company does provide the ability to book a free demo of the product.
#8: Goodjuju
A Comprehensive Service to Automate Marketing
Creating a powerful marketing and listing machine is one area that can be a challenge. Fortunately, Goodjuju® provides amazing listing websites that can help you stand out from the crowd and do the hard work of showcasing your listings for you.
Features
Goodjuju offers plenty of done-for-you marketing services, such as:
- Reputation improvement: The Goodjuju team uses automated follow ups to encourage your clients to leave reviews on your services
- Website design: They’ll create an aesthetically pleasing website that showcases your brand and helps convert visitors into leads
- Local SEO: They’ll help you target local keywords so that you can be found in the searches that matter most
- Google ads: They’ll use targeted ad campaigns to attract the leads you care about
Pricing
Goodjuju’s pricing varies, depending on your needs. Book a free analysis with them to get insights on how you can grow your marketing presence and which of their services suit your needs.
Which Property Management Automation Tools are Best for You?
All of the property management automation tools on this list could be a useful addition to your tech stack. After all, they all serve to streamline a different component of your property management needs. For example, Goodjuju can help with marketing listings while ShowingHero can assist with simplifying the listing process and PropertyMeld allows you to automate maintenance tasks.
However, when you’re looking for all-in-one property management automation software that also lets you integrate several of the solutions in this list, Buildium is hard to beat. Its single platform means you’ll be able to automate more tasks and see all your data in one place. And, when there’s gaps in what you want to automate and what the software provides, you can always turn to a fully-integrated partner or its open API to create customized, automated workflows.
If you’re ready to explore what we can do for your property management business, request a demo or start a risk-free, 14-day free trial today.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I choose the right property automation tools for my needs?
Choosing the right property automation tools is all about knowing where your property management business burns the most time. Once you know where your team is spending hours of labor, you can begin to investigate automation solutions that will lighten the load.
How easy is it to integrate property management automation tools with my existing systems?
Depending on which property management software solution you use, it may be very easy to integrate these tools into your existing systems. For example, Buildium integrates seamlessly with all of the options on this list, as well as the other offerings in its marketplace.
Are there mobile versions available for these property management automation tools?
In some cases, there may be mobile apps available for these tools. To start, PropUp offers an app to make move-in and move-out inspections much easier.
What are the benefits of choosing an all-in-one property management automation software vs. creating my own tech stack?
There are many benefits to choosing an all-in-one property automation software. Namely, the fact that you’ll be able to work from one central location and have all of your data in one place. You’ll no longer have to worry about juggling multiple systems or keeping multiple spreadsheets.