Letting agents share how they speed up property visits

Property visits remain one of the greatest time intensive activities for the letting agent. From prospecting visits, show rounds, inventories and check-ins to interim property inspections, maintenance appointments and check-outs, these essential trips can’t be avoided but can be sped up thanks to some creative approaches to old problems.

Here are five ways the most competitive, efficiency-focused agents are utilising platforms and apps to slash the time spent on visits.

Smart scheduling with Google Maps

Coordinating property visits takes almost as much time as the visits themselves – especially if you have a larger team with multiple diaries to check. That’s what the developers discovered at Inventory Hive when they reached out to their user base to research where the black holes were in admin time for agents.

The findings resulted in the development of a diary with maps features and route optimisation feature with Google Maps, which visually displays the best route for visits dependent on inspector schedules. This not only results in more efficient travel planning, it also makes mileage monitoring, travel cost and carbon calculations significantly easier too.

Automatic communications

Letting agents also reported that the to-and-fro of emails and telephone tag with tenants can take hours, often over days. Liaising with tenants to arrange suitable times to visit is a time-heavy process in the PRS.

However, switched on letting agents are leveraging the power of automation in emails and messages to reduce the repetitive manual communications. Much of this can be done in-app or platform, which can work seamlessly out of hours when agents aren’t even at their desk. It works simply and cleanly, automatically sending appointment details to tenants without manually emailing or telephoning, and receiving automatic confirmation from the tenant when they agree a time. It’s these small changes that can make a big difference to an agent’s day.

Another great time saver is to automatically schedule recurring interim property visits based on the last appointment.

Dictate and convert to text

Note-taking on property visits can triple inspection time. Converting those notes into reports only adds to that and duplicates efforts unnecessarily.

To overcome the laborious process, agents are now using dictation out in the field, and voice-to-text technology to speed up inventory checks and reports back at the office. They record their observations on site by speaking into a specially designed application, and tech does the rest, turning those recordings into typed reports.

These shortcuts and innovations only scratch the surface of how proptech is streamlining tenancy management processes for letting agents. Visit Inventory Hive to learn more or book in for a quick chat with a member of the Inventory Hive team here.