Commercial property management comes with its fair share of challenges. Juggling current tenants, future customers, investors, and lenders all while keeping your properties running day-to-day can often feel like an uphill battle. This is especially true as your business grows and your workload grows with it.
The good news is that today, the technology to grant you easy property management is right at your fingertips. Here, we’ll review some of the toughest challenges of commercial property management, then discover the ways that STRATAFOLIO helps you navigate difficulties and work towards growth.
Biggest Challenges Commercial Property Managers Face
While challenges will differ between locations, businesses, and types of property, many commercial property managers deal with a similar set of struggles. While some of these may seem small, simple, or obvious, in reality they are often huge drains on time and revenue. Some of these major issues include:
Outdated Systems
Businesses who try to track all their financial and management information by hand or in a series of spreadsheets often find that these systems are impossible to maintain. Entry errors, poor labelling, and lack of training on the setup for new employees result in frequent data losses and inaccurate calculations. Not only do you end up wasting time and money trying to find the information you need, inaccurate or unreliable systems can make tenants and investors lose trust in your business.
Missed Dates and Deadlines
Forgetting a date like a lease ending or a rent escalation is more than a simple mistake. Instead, this can end up costing you a surprising amount in missed revenue. For unexpected lease endings, you will likely spend much longer with a vacancy, since you didn’t start searching for a new tenant in advance. For missed rent escalations, you may simply have to accept the revenue shortage or risk damaging your relationship with your tenant by enforcing a sudden increase.
Poor Accounting
Even businesses who use modern property management software may struggle with accounting. Many software options come with no or limited accounting tools, and do not connect to outside accounting software. This leaves businesses struggling with brute-force workarounds or subpar alternatives that could easily be avoided by the right software.
Difficulty Managing Tenant Relationships
Between rent payments, lease agreements, and constant maintenance requirements, cultivating strong, trusting tenant relationships is one of the trickiest parts of a property manager’s job. Good relationships with tenants can bring you stable, lasting lease agreements and even recommendations; poor relationships can result in a bad reputation. When property managers don’t have the tools to track lease details, receive rent payments, and respond quickly to maintenance issues and other concerns, tenant relationships quickly become endangered.
How STRATAFOLIO Streamlines and Automates Troublesome Processes
At STRATAFOLIO, we’re familiar with all these challenges. That’s why we build software specifically designed to help you not only navigate them, but take advantage of them to create more efficient systems that gear you towards growth. Read on to discover some of our features that help you manage your properties with ease.
Emphasis on Automation
STRATAFOLIO strives to incorporate modern, automated processes wherever possible to reduce your workload and stress. Instead of worrying about messy documents and inaccurate calculations, allow STRATAFOLIO’s 1-click automated common area maintenance reconciliation tool to give you fast and accurate results every time.
Alerts and Notifications
Never miss a key deadline again with an automated alert system that notifies you for lease endings, rent escalations, and other important dates. Instead of scrambling to fill vacancies or worrying about missed revenue, you can prepare in advance to find strong new tenants and set strategic rates.
On-Demand Reports
Instead of manually constructing dozens of reports over and over again, STRATAFOLIO allows you to quickly generate exactly the report you need. Whether you’re looking to present data to investors or hunt down the source of a cash flow issue, customized reports allow you to get the big picture of your whole portfolio or dig into the details of a single property.
Tenant Portals and Maintenance Tracking
Take care of tenant needs with an all-in-one tenant portal. Here, you can easily communicate with tenants to address any questions or concerns, as well as receive and track progress on any maintenance requests, ensuring that issues are addressed quickly. Plus, online ACH payment and invoice options make it convenient for tenants to pay rent and for you to verify that you’ve received the correct amount.
QuickBooks Integration
Get the best of both property management and accounting worlds with STRATAFOLIO’s complete two-way integration with QuickBooks Desktop and Online. Instead of relying on a limited, unknown system, you can take advantage of QuickBooks’ powerful functionality and familiarity for most accountants and business owners. Plus, all your data automatically syncs in both locations, saving you from error-prone and time-consuming double entry.
Help When You Need It, How You Need It
Finally, if you still have questions or concerns, STRATAFOLIO is here to help. Access phone, email, and AI chat help lines to get exactly the help you need, no matter where or when you need it. Our team includes experts in software, commercial property management, and QuickBooks. We are always prepared to support you in achieving your business goals.
Learn More About What STRATAFOLIO Can Do for Your Business
If you’re ready to escape the struggles of outdated property management strategies, take a closer look at STRATAFOLIO’s solutions. Whatever your commercial real estate goals, STRATAFOLIO’s automation-focused, flexible software is designed to support you every step of the way.
For more information, schedule a free 1:1 demo with our team today.
