There’s No Business Like “Show” Bu...

for rent Let’s face it. Many rental markets around the country are hot right now. Maybe not “Trophy Wife/Husband” hot, but it’s pretty easy to rent a place out. Property managers and rental owners are digging what they are seeing.

Good markets mean lots of renters. They also mean lots of showings for available rental units.

When you put out an ad for your rental property, you may receive a lot more responses than you anticipated. Answering emails, phone calls and text messages at all sorts of weird and inconvenient times can become a real pain. Suddenly you’re writing appointments and phone numbers on yellow stickies, used envelopes, your arm, and whatever else is close at hand when a potential tenant contacts you.

You also have to make sure you don’t schedule one showing on top of another showing, or forget when you have a showing. And, how about reminding all your prospects of their show times, so they don’t stand you up?

Maybe with so many inquiries you don’t mind losing the contact info for a few potential renters? Um, I doubt it. No landlord wants to do that. What if the one you lost is the best of the bunch?

A Rental “App”-lication for Landlords

You knew where I was going….

There’s an app for that. Although it is not designed specifically for landlords, there are lots of apps out there for setting appointments with customers. Today I’m going to show you one that works very well for landlords, and how we use it.

I chose the Appointy App for several reasons:

Pretty much everything you need is included in the free version
It integrates with your Google calendar
You can automatically send email and text messages to both you and your potential renters to remind them of their appointment. You can also text an automatic ‘Thank you’ after the showing
You can embed it on your website

These features really work well for scheduling all your showings while keeping costs down.

Let Me Show You the Way, Grasshopper

When you sign up for the free version of Appointy, it will ask you to put in your company name. This will become your URL for your renters to access the schedule.

A (fake) example would be: http://www.KingKongProperties.appointy.com

Then you can set up your personalized schedule that can be seen by prospective tenants:

You can use the menus on the bar at the top left to set hours that you are available to show the properties, see a list of prospective tenants (under the customer tab) that are coming to see the property and generally change the settings of how you would like to schedule the showings.

Cool, right? But wait, there’s more…

Once you set the hours available, you can put the Appointy URL for your business in your ads on Craigslist, Postlets or wherever else you advertise for tenants. Be careful of sites like Craigslist that get their knickers in a twist if you put certain links in your ads. You may have to spell out the links in a certain way such as:

“KingKongProperties ‘Dot’ Appointy ‘Dot’ Com”

That way the Craiglist Police don’t flag you.

The prospective tenants will then click on the link (or type it in their browser) and go to a page like this:

They will be able to click on a time that works for them and an automatic appointment will be set up. Tenants will have to enter their name, address, phone number and email to set it up. We normally tell them to put the address of the property to rent in the ‘address’ line because:

Many prospective tenants really don’t want to put their current address on a website until they have met you.
If we have multiple properties to show, it is easy to distinguish which property the tenant wants to see.

Once they have filled out their information, Appointy can send the prospective tenant a professional email and/or text message saying the appointment is set. The program can also send you a notification via email and put the appointment on your Gmail or Iocal calendar, so you have it in your main calendar.

You can set those notifications on the Notifications screen in the settings menu:

Note: The text messages do cost a little money (11.2₵ as of this writing), but if it prevents a no-show, they are worth it.

Property Management, Schmoperty Management

The key to good property management is being able to get the most work done with the least amount of effort. Good property managers have lots of systems and processes in place to make things easy on themselves. They have learned how to…

Eliminate tasks that really don’t add value to their business and just take up valuable time
Automate the jobs they can’t eliminate as much as possible by using technology
Delegate lots of tasks that they either don’t have the time or expertise to do themselves (and that they can’t automate or eliminate)

If you think this sounds like ‘Four Hour Work Week” stuff, it definitely is. Appointy is one way to automate the showing process. We encourage you to keep finding more. If you want to learn more about Appointy, check out this introductory video.

Improve Scheduling – There is so much to juggle as a real estate investor: properties, tenants, contractors, etc. Is it time to look at how organized you are and improve it?

Customer Service – Whether its prospective tenants or prospective buyers for your flips, consider how you treat them. People who have good experiences with you will generally help you make more money. How can you use technology to provide those good experiences?

Measure Your Business – “What gets measured gets done.” Besides the money coming in, what else do you measure in your business to see what you can improve? Appointy has a bunch of measurements you can use to see how many tenants are attracted to your rentals. You can use the app or find other ways to measure your business.