Advice For Landlords: How To Automate Your Landlord Duties

Whether you’ve been a landlord for a few months or a few years, you’ll know that it’s not as easy as sitting back, cracking open a beer, and watching as the money rolls right on into your bank account every month!

Being a landlord in the UK is a job. And as with any job, you’ll have responsibilities.Managing things like property certificates, maintenance requests, tenant changeovers, and more can be very time-consuming and stressful at times.

But what if you could automate your landlord duties and spend less time handling repetitive property or tenant-related tasks and more time living? In this blog, you’ll learn how you can craft your dream landlord life by taking advantage of the many tools at your disposal. Let’s go!

Your options for automating landlord responsibilities

So, what exactly can you automate when it comes to your landlord’s responsibilities and duties? Well, quite a lot, actually! Learn more about how you can speed up, streamline, and hit automated pilot on a wide range of landlord responsibilities below:

1. Searching for tenants

When you need to find tenants for your property, the whole advertising and application process can get pretty jarring if you don’t have smart systems in place. So, what are those smart systems?

Keep your property description, photos, and property listing website logins in a Google Drive folder, so you can easily post more ads when and as needed (without digging into your files all over again). You can also streamline applications by creating an online application form instead of letting tenants flood your inbox.

2. Onboarding tenants

Create an email template that you can easily copy and paste to any new tenant, simply changing key information. Using a digital tenancy contract service, you can easily send and sign lease agreements on the go, so you don’t waste time running through it with your new tenants on the day.

You can also ask your previous tenants for any important information about the property – like how to turn on the heating or air conditioning, how the shower works, setting the alarm, and anything else new tenants need to know. Then you can easily pass on this information to your new tenants. Once you receive your documents, keep them in one Google folder for easy reference.

3. Collecting rent

If you’re still asking your tenants for rent in the form of cheques or cash, you’re wasting a whole heap of valuable time that could be better spent elsewhere. So, make it easy for your tenants to set up a direct debit that allows you to receive rent on the same day every month. Whether it’s Revolut, Apple Pay, Paypal, or your bank’s online service, you can make collecting rent easier than ever. Direct debits also mean no more tenants sending rent late; you’ll always receive it how you want and on time.

4. Renewing leases

Using a property management tool or landlord app, you’ll get a bird’s eye view of the key information for every property and tenant in one centralised location. You’ll also be able to automate tenant lease renewal notifications so you never miss a lease renewal again.
These property management tools and landlord apps often come with other features that make landlord life more manageable, like tenant communication, accounting, tax, and cost management technology.

5. Fulfilling maintenance needs

One of the most stressful aspects of being a landlord is that you’re technically never off the clock. Since you’re in charge of maintenance, if a pipe bursts in the middle of the night or there’s a major incident – it’s you who your tenants call to sort it out.
So, how can you make carrying out property maintenance that bit easier? By asking your tenants to submit maintenance requests via an online property management system. This way, you have documentation for evidence and minimise the risk of human error.

6. Automating property certificates

One of the more time-consuming landlord duties is ensuring your property has all its gas, electricity, and energy performance certificates up-to-date. The problem is, you might forget when the deadlines are to renew these and get stamped with a government fine and finding engineers is difficult.
Using a property certificate automation tool, like Symple, makes managing properties easy by automating all your required certificates, from securing a verified local engineer to sending you automated notifications for renewals, and creating a digital paper trail.

Simple: Your answer to easy property certificate management

We hope this blog has inspired you to get your automation hat on and start streamlining your landlord processes to take away the stress of tenant and property management. Want to try out an automation tool today to see how much better being a landlord is?

Symple’s user-friendly platform makes it as simple as clicking a button to source reliable engineers from your local area for gas, energy performance, or electrical safety certificates.

No more calls back and forth to arrange appointments, forgetting to renew your certificates, losing track of receipts, or facing fines – Symple takes care of the entire process for you.

Simply add your property information and the date of the last gas, energy performance, or electrical safety certificate, hit renew, and we’ll do the rest – it’s simple!

Learn more about how Symple works and order your certificates online today.