Top 3 Web Resources for Landlords

We all know that being a Landlord is a great paying job because you enjoy all the benefits of owning real estate and your tenants are paying for it.Unlike wholesaling or fixing and flipping houses, a Landlord builds his wealth one acquisition at a time and gets paid multiple times on each deal. Some of the financial benefits include capturing equity (net worth), monthly cash flow, and depreciation benefits.

What holds back a lot of investors from becoming Landlords is the dreadful thought of finding and screening tenants, managing the backed-up plumbing, and the challenges of collecting rent. A lot more investors would be jumping in if they knew how to manage property without the hassles.
The good news is that finding good tenants and managing your properties is easier than ever when you have the very best web resources to support your efforts.

Postlets

This is your one-stop shop to syndicate your vacancy to twenty of the very best real estate websites.
The syndication includes automatic postings to these sites: Zillow, Yahoo Homes, HGTV Front Door, Hot Pads, AOL Real Estate, MSN Real Estate.
Postlets is fast and easy to use and the posting process captures your property information in a very logical format. It starts with your contact information, your property details, photos and videos.
Being able to post a video or virtual tour of your rental is very powerful, and you can include the embedded code straight from a YouTube video.
Once your postlet is created, you can post it to all the syndicated partner websites, you will have the option to share it to your Twitter and Facebook contacts, and you will be provided with a unique URL that you can continue to use in all of your marketing.

My Smart Move

Screening your tenants is absolutely critical to your success as a Landlord. My Smart Move is an excellent website for Landlords who want to screen their tenants. It gives you the ability to screen for credit and a complete national criminal background check.

My favorite feature: The entire process is online, initiated by the tenant, and paid for by the tenant.  The premium screening packaging costs $25.00 to get the full credit report and criminal background report.

When you want to screen a tenant, you email them a link and they complete the process directly with My Smart Move. Once they approve and pay for it, you’ll have your report within a few minutes. The credit report is based on Trans-Union, and they provide you with customization based on your screening preferences.
Once you have the credit report and criminal background report you can feel confident about screening and selecting the right tenants for your property.

Buildium

I began using Buildium about a year ago, and now I could not imagine managing my property without it. It’s an affordable, complete management system in one platform for both the Landlord and the Tenant.
Here are some of the features I love about Buildium:

  • Free website –  Buildium helps you set up your own property management website, which is a great place to send tenants who want to complete a rental application. You can customize your application and potential tenants can easily complete it online. Once they complete it, you can request them to pay for a credit check, and you can complete their screening for both credit and criminal background – all from within your Buildium site.
  • Easy rent collection – With Buildium, you can establish an online tenant payment system that allows them to pay by check, credit card, or debit card online. Our tenants love this feature because they can pay their rent right from their homes. Buildium has excellent reporting for tracking all of your tenants who owe you rent, which makes life easier when trying to collect it.
  •  Complete general ledger accounting – You can maintain individual property and tenant records, balance your books, track maintenance expenses, and create a wide variety of financial reports quickly and easily with this system.
  • Maintenance requests – No need for tenants to call or text you for maintenance requests. Instead, instruct them to complete an online maintenance work order. You can then forward it directly to your handy man for completion.
  • Tenant and lease tracking –  All of your tenant and lease information will be in one single location online. The system flags you as a lease is about to expire, and you can easily communicate with individual tenants or your whole batch via postal mail or email. It’s a great way to communicate things like reminders to change filters or late payments that are applied to rent due. And you can use the postal mail for sending your pay or quit statements.

The key to being a successful Landlord is having great systems in place. With these three web resources, you’ll be able to reduce your stress and increase your productivity. Then you can focus on gaining profits and buying more houses.
What about you?  What are some of your favorite real estate websites and what ideas do you have making property management a more stress-free activity?
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3 Comments

  1. Gary Proctor on September 19, 2014 at 6:04 am

    Awesome article Jim. I use Postlets all the time & it work wonders for marketing a property. I’ve never tried My Smart Move or Buildium. I usually do an online background check but I really like the idea of the tenant initiating the process. Buildium is something I’ll be looking into ASAP. That sounds like it would be a one stop shop for the rental business.
    I love automation and these 3 suggestions all help streamline the rental business. Thanks for the info! Gary

  2. Tony Totanes on September 26, 2014 at 8:12 am

    Thanks for the the article. Interesting. Lots of information.

  3. Queenie on February 4, 2015 at 2:15 pm

    Great article! Thanks.

By Jim Ingersoll

Jim Ingersoll is a successful real estate entrepreneur, Author and Coach. He has bought and sold hundreds of houses wholesaling, flipping and buying to hold for the long-term. Jim loves all aspects of creating winning transactions with creative real estate.