After developing rental property management software for many years, it recently occurred to me that many property management companies that are searching for quality online property management software would find it helpful to know what other property management companies have requested as useful features.  So I have decided to put together a list of the top 5 requested features in our web based property management software.

1. Marketing of Properties Online
   Having the ability to advertize available properties online is critical today.  Our clients want the ability to have their own custom property website, as well as, being able to update popular sites with property information automatically, without having to update all of the sites individually.  Some popular sites that have been requested were CraigsList, Google Real Estate, and RentalHomePros.  Rental Home Pros is a NARPM (National Association of Residential Property Managers) sponsored aggregate site that also feeds over 20 other sites like Google Base, RentalHomesPlus, Tenant.com, HomeTownRent, Rentals.com, and of course CraigsList.
2. Tenant Screening
   For residential property management software, having an integrated process of getting credit and criminal screening reports is a must.  Our clients often request tenant screening services through Credit Retriever, a subsidiary of TransUnion.
3. Custom Rental Lease Forms
   Every property management company establishes a lease format that they use for their tenants.  The ability to interface with a site that provides custom lease forms that will include the lease information stored in the property management database is a common request by our clients.  A popular site providing custom lease forms is Blue Moon.
4. Rent Collection Service
   A highly requested feature is to interface to a tenant debt collection service from within the property management program, automatically sending on needed data to the service with a click of a mouse.  The service requested by our clients is NCC Business Services.
5. QuickBooks Interface
   Having a QuickBooks interface is useful, even if the product has a full General Ledger accounting system built in.  It allows for copying of the data to a highly popular product for additional financial reporting or auditing needs.

Make sure any property management software you are looking at has the above features or simply checkout our rental property management software to see how these features will benefit your organization.

Rob Crichlow
DIY Real Estate Solutions

This entry was posted on Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Property Management Software Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.