Here is a thought leadership article from Inventory Hive

It’s hard to argue the value of digital tenancy management.

The environmental benefits of a more remote and paperless business are clearer than they’ve ever been. Cutting out unnecessary paper and travel reduces a company’s carbon footprint significantly. The pandemic showed us that. If you aren’t looking at your ecological impact already, 2022 is most surely the year to get moving on that one.

But the business benefits of digitising tenancy processes go much further than that.

Digital tenancy management delivers much better organisation (and less physical storage space) than traditional paper filing and sharing. It’s also far more secure, improves collaboration and makes it easier to comply with the latest property legislation.

The efficiencies and cost savings can’t be disputed either. Landlords and agents routinely report massive time savings when moving from traditional tenancy management to an app-based system.

The hours spent on property advertising, visits, moving tenants in and out, background checks, property inspections, risk assessments, reporting, certificates, maintenance, deposits and rent payments all adds up. That also shows just how much a letting agent does in a day!

All the time-intensive admin tasks can be radically streamlined and automated in the digital sphere of a well-developed app. You can set up prompts, reminders, inspection questionnaires, reporting templates and more.

The point is to let the code do the donkey work so agents can focus on the more complex issues and relationship management with tenants and landlords.

And that’s where the perfect scenario lies.

The role of tenancy proptech is to make life easier for everyone in the process – not to eradicate those people. Property professionals have deep local knowledge and honed skills to sell, communicate and placate in a way that can’t be replicated digitally.

There’s a wrong way and a right way to digitise the tenancy process.

The wrong way is to try and replace the people aspect of tenancy management. The right way is about becoming more time and cost-efficient:

1. Look for the heavy admin tasks – the ones that take the most time for the lowest yield (inspection reports, property show-rounds, right-to-rent checks, check-ins/outs, etc.) and automate the aspects that are more vulnerable to human error or low-return time drains.

2. Look at which activities are critical for compliance and make sure these are automatically scheduled and integrated with up-to-date regulations to avoid unexpected or accidental legal issues and fees.

3. How much time is spent chasing tenants, landlords or third parties up to organise date-sensitive visits, signatures, inspections, cleaning, etc? There are ways to automate this so people can easily confirm appointments and integrate diaries via their phone.

4. Calculate how much time and money is spent on show-round visits (including travel) in a day and include data on average conversion (how many visits per property are successful?). How much time and money would you save doing remote show-rounds or 360-degree pre-created video tours?

5. If you do remote property visits and inspections already, have you noticed a drop or increase in conversion? If it’s dropped, are you utilising the latest rich features like embedded photos, hot spots, annotations and information hyperlinks? These ‘extras’ allow your agents to add in their local knowledge, property highlights, reports, certificates, and useful information that can help with faster decision-making.

The switched-on agents look at where they can deliver the most competitive value in the business for the greatest return, and then they put their people on those tasks. They leave the rest to automation – and that’s where the growth happens.

Who is Inventory Hive? 

Beautifully simple cloud-based property reporting and 360° virtual tour software – allowing for market-leading paperless management of inventories, check-ins, interim visits, comparative check-outs, customisable reports, and easy-to-use 360° virtual tours. 

Click here to find out how Inventory Hive can help your agency

David Mintz, Revenue & Marketing Director at Kerfuffle talks to Jak Florence from Sandstone UK about how Inventory Hive has helped his business. Could they help yours too?

Click here to find out how Inventory Hive can help your agency