Prime Property Care are property managers with a twist. They manage Houses of Multiple Occupation (HMO). It’s a fancy way to say: flatshares but with individual contracts for each tenant.
The homes they manage are often family-style homes that are split into individually rented rooms with shared kitchen and living spaces.
The challenges of multiple tenants
To lease a HMO, the team finds up to six individual tenants and manages up to six leases for each house. Tenanting a property can result in up to six times the paperwork of the traditional leasing model (where a property manager finds one person or family and organises one lease for each home.).
They have the extra challenge of needing to find multiple tenants regularly. In HMO properties are usually only signed for six months. It’s rare for tenants to stay for multiple years and be on rolling contracts.
“We need to constantly look for tenants. Our marketing strategy needs to be highly optimised to find tenants and we need to make sure the lease signing process is easy to compete. It helps us to find tenants straight away and have no tenancy voids.” — Prime Property Care
So, how has this growing property management business gone from admin headache to happy tenants?
Automated SMS. Time saved. Happier tenants
Prime Property Care focuses on automating as many tasks as they can using workflow automation.
To optimise their tenanting process, the team uses an automated SMS workflow.
There are at least 10 steps involved in the lease application process. The tenant needs to view the property, view, submit the documents and references, sign the agreement, check in with the realtor, and more.
Managing this process manually is time consuming for property managers. Plus, it makes it difficult to consistently maintain the high-level of customer service Prime Property Care prides itself on.
Automated SMS to the rescue. Prime Property Care sends ten automated text messages or nudges to move people through the application process. The text messages have links included. For example, a link to submit an application form or confirm a viewing.
These SMS messages help Prime Property Care get tenants moved into homes quickly and maintain a low vacancy rate for landlords.
Finding the key to budget-friendly SMS
ClickSend isn’t the first SMS provider that Prime Property Care has used. But, it is the platform that fits their unique needs the most.
“ClickSend is a very competitive price, I like that and I think it’s very reasonable. I wasn’t looking for the cheapest provider, I was looking for a decent provider with a reasonable price”. — Prime Property Care
Prime Property Care’s previous SMS provider was more expensive and didn’t have additional features. Since Prime Property Care has a custom built CRM they need tools that are easy to integrate. Our 200+ integrations helped sweeten the deal.
“With ClickSend, we’re paying three times less than we used to. And we’re getting even better service. It has the right integrations too — everything just works.” — Prime Property Care
Turning a 20 minute task into a 10 second task with Bulk SMS
After the team switched to ClickSend, they fixed another time-draining task with text messaging.
Let’s say a property manager needed to contact all of the tenants in one home, which is five people or more. In the past, the property manager would have to work out which tenants lived at the property. Then search through 3,000 CRM contacts to get their details. Copy and paste the message to each person and manually send the messages.
This manual task could take 20 minutes or more. Nope.
By considering how Prime Property Care’s custom CRM could work with ClickSend, they found a ten second solution. The team attached contact lists to each house in the CRM. Then, they coded-in bulk messaging functionality using ClickSend’s API.
“API was easy to follow, it was easy to get examples — it was well structured and the notes provided were great. You could see that someone took care to write it in a way that whoever is reading it for the first time can follow it through”. — Prime Property Care
Now, a property manager can open up the property details in the CRM. Type one message that is sent to each contact living in the home. The messages are personalised with name and other tenant details using simple placeholders. Which gives the tenant the feeling of personalised service, while saving the property manager time. Everyone wins.
Power-up property businesses with SMS
Do you run a property or service-based business? We’d love to show you how you can reduce admin time and speed up application processes with text messaging. It’s easier than you think. Sign up for a 14 day trial and try SMS — we’ll even gift you some credit to start sending.
