Yahoo Finance Buy-to-let: the tech that makes property investment easy
Property investors have it tough: stamp duty has soared, profits are being crunched by the tapering of mortgage interest tax relief and now there is the potential impact of the Government’s tenant fee ban.
But thanks to technology, it’s never been easier to be a landlord. Gone are the days of calling around to try to find a handyman to mend a broken boiler, or hassling tenants who haven’t paid their rent. If you have a property problem, there is an app to fix it. Here’s our pick of the best apps that are revolutionising the old-fashioned world of letting, and helping landlords save time and money too.
Finding your tenants
High street letting agents are increasingly being cut out with the rise of online equivalents such as OpenRent, which allows landlords to directly advertise their property online then manage it themselves.
PerchPeek bills itself as “Tinder for renting”: prospective tenants swipe right for properties that they like and left for those they don’t, while being asked questions about what they are looking for in order to better focus the search.
It launched last September, expanded into London last month and currently has around 6,000 properties on its books. PerchPeek is free for landlords to list – you are charged a one-off fee of £89 only once a tenant moves in – and it mostly caters to people who own between three and 15 properties.
Paul Bennett, the company’s co-founder, says that he set up the business after watching his mother struggle to find the right tenants for properties that she owned. He realised that using the right tech could dramatically cut the time it took to find somewhere to rent.
“Landlords spend less time fielding unsuitable tenants, it costs nothing to list and we are able to market their property across 75 different platforms, including Facebook. If the average tenant takes 40 hours [to find a home], we are aiming for it to take 10 hours,” he says.
Signing them up
Paperwork can be a headache for landlords. But Louise Thompson, who lets four properties in east London, says she has gone paperless. “It means I don’t have lots of paper, and tenants can’t lose their paperwork,” she explains. She uses software such as DocuSign to enable her to send and verify documentation via email; this is vital when tenant turnover is high. Her homes are rented out by the room, as houses in multiple occupation (HMOs), which often means tenants use them as a short-term stop-gap.
“I often rent to doctors and nurses, and they tend to stay for six months and then their contract ends and they move on,” she explains. “They stay for between six and eight months, and then after that you have to redo the paperwork for someone else. Using technology hugely helps with that.” Another potentially time-consuming and paper-generating activity is drawing up an inventory. You can pay an agent to do it or take care of it yourself, but there are apps that make the whole thing much easier.
Richard Abbots set up RLA Inventory Plus after having a poor experience as a tenant. He wanted the process to be more transparent for both landlords and tenants, allowing images of a property’s condition to be stored on the app and updated if things change.
“When a tenant moves in, they get their report electronically,” he explains. “If they don’t agree with anything on it, they can take a photograph and upload it to the app.” He reasons that if a tenant has agreed to the inventory from the beginning, there are less likely to be disputes about the condition of the property when they leave.
Property management
Managing a portfolio of properties could be a daunting task, but some enterprising landlords are utilising technology to make life easier. Alex Elsey and his wife, Shenaz, became “accidental landlords” in 2009 when they moved house and began renting out their previous home. They moved into managing HMOs in 2014, and now own seven properties in Watford and Bushey, housing 41 tenants.
“We use what are known as customer relationship management (CRM) systems such as Arthur and GoTenant! to help us manage the properties,” Alex explains. These provide everything from arranging viewings to reporting repairs.
Like fellow landlord Thompson, he has managed to go almost paperless thanks to documentation software, and estimates that he now spends just 10 minutes with tenants to sign contracts, rather than an hour when he was doing the process the old-fashioned way.
When tenants reported problems with the heating in his properties, he turned to Inspire Home Automation, a system that allows him to monitor the temperature in the homes remotely. “That saves us 90 per cent of visits to properties,” he estimates, adding that he usually knows something has gone wrong with a boiler before his tenants even notice.
What happens if something goes wrong and you need a tradesman to come and fix it in a hurry? A number of companies, such as TaskRabbit, Fixflo and Plentific, will find a local worker to manage repairs with little more than a tap of your mobile phone.
Rent collection
You’ve got a tenant in your property and things seem to be going well. But it is easy to become overwhelmed with the financial administration of managing rental payments. Manoj Varsani hopes to change all that with his new app, Hammock.
“It allows landlords to collect rent and track payments via a bank account, with features to help you do that,” he explains. “For example, it automatically sends your tenants payment reminders and notifies them when payment is due, and then tells you when a tenant makes a payment, meaning unpaid rent can be easily tracked.”
At the moment, Hammock is being trialled as a beta version, with fewer than 100 users, but Varsani hopes to roll it out later this year. The app also tracks expenses for each property, helping a landlord when it comes to preparing a tax return.
Are you a landlord that has used any of these apps? Or others? Do you find them helpful? Tell us what you think in the comments section below.
