Property Management Software Features

So you have decided to investigate buying property management software to help with the task of managing your rental properties. Maybe you currently use pen and paper, a spreadsheet program or an accounting package to keep your records. Maybe you are looking to switch to a more property management centric program or need your new software to be compatible or able to integrate with your current solution. Is purchasing software specifically geared toward managing properties more beneficial than your current system or the alternatives? That is the question you need to answer for yourself, but consider some of the commonly available features of property management software before you come to a conclusion.

Property management software should include accounting features to help you track income and expenses for each of your properties. This feature is obviously critical and luckily almost all programs designed for managing properties are designed around tracking income and expenses. Perhaps you also need the program you choose to be able to track your business income and expenses such as management fees and advertising expenses as well. Most applications can accomodate this need as well.

Since you manage properties, you also need to be able to easily store and access property specific information. This might include data such as maintenance history, mortgage information, deposit liabilities held, insurance, taxes or homeowner information. A good program will enable you to track all of these things and more.

Managing rentals also requires storing data on current, past and potential tenants. Your package should help you do this and most applications built with rental managers in mind will. Ensuring compliance with local laws regarding rental housing is another aspect of your business that real estate management specific software can potentially aid. Some packages will allow you to document your dealings with tenants easily or store checklists you can use to make sure you are in compliance.

As a property manager, you need to generate reports both at timed intervals such as fiscal year end but also on demand at any given point in time. Your software needs to be able to provide you with reports for tax purposes, statements for tenants or homeowners and property reports such as a rent roll or a vacancy report. Most commercially available software for real estate managing will have canned versions of these reports. Some programs may also allow varying degrees of report customization.

Properties cannot be managed without forms that need to be printed and/or signed and a number of programs can generate the required paperwork using built-in forms or templates or by integrating your data with other applications for mail merges. This makes generating applications, checklists, statements, notices and letters so much easier and is a nice feature to have. Some hosted property management software vendors even allow these documents to stored online and shared out to others over the Web.

With these features in mind, you will be able to evaluate property management software and decide which package if any is right for you.

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