Reports2Go

You’re not still living in the 20th Century, are you?

When you run a letting agency, you have many responsibilities. You have to check that a landlord’s property is in reasonable condition to let and advise the landlord if there is anything which needs to be done to bring the property up to scratch before advertising for tenants.

You should also have contacts with builders, electricians, plumbers, roofers, and so on, whom you can ask to carry out any work which may be required if the landlord does not want to use their own tradespeople, or if they do not have any contacts: perhaps, they are a new landlord. They may have inherited a property and want to let it, or they may be setting out to invest in properties and as this is their first one, they have no trade contacts.

Ideally, you should also be able to be contacted by a tenant if there is an emergency such as a plumbing leak in the night, which needs urgent attention.

Then, of course, you have to advertise for tenants, interview them, and carry out a credit check to check out their payment history. You don’t want to advise your landlord to take on an inappropriate tenant. You also have to know how to handle eviction proceedings if they do become necessary.

Of course, you need to carry out an inventory report at check-in and carry out interim inventories and a check-out report at the end of the tenancy. If you have a lot of properties on your books, then carrying out inventory is going to be one of your biggest ongoing tasks. You may have to sub-contract it out. Even so, mid-term inspections will still be something you have to do.

Property reports are a task that really is an essential part of letting a property. The problem that virtually every letting agent has is that inventory is so very time-consuming. Your landlords can have properties anywhere. Very likely, most of them will be relatively local, but even so they could be across a 30-mile radius or even more.

If you have a lot of landlords, which, as a letting agent is what you want (the more the merrier!) it also means a lot of property report work. Not only do you have the check-in and check-out reports, but there are all the interim inspections. The result is that you are carrying out inventory inspections on a non-stop basis.

Furthermore, you can’t just carry out inventory based on popping your head around the door and telling the tenant that everything looks OK. You need to carry out a thorough inspection if you are going to provide the proper service to your clients, who are the landlords, and that means looking under the sink and checking for leaks, checking the garden, and a whole lot more. It takes time.

The faster you can do a Property Report, the better

Therefore, the faster that you can get through an inventory inspection, the better it is for your business, and ultimately your profits.

Now it is a fact that today we are in the 21st century. It is also a sad fact that many letting agents are still, to all intents and purposes, firmly entrenched in the 20th century. Would you believe that they are still using a clipboard and pen to take their notes with? Yes, some of them are.

But things have come on in leaps and bounds. We have people like Bezos and Musk taking their mates into space for a ride for heaven’s sake!

And you’re still using a CLIPBOARD??

Uuuurrrggghh!

Today you should be using the Reports2Go inventory app. It’s FREE!

If you don’t know how our inventory app works, here’s the deal. You download it from the App Store or Google Play to your mobile or tablet. You can use it in one of two modes, the first of which is text mode. As you go through the property you simply type up your notes and then when you are done you upload to your portal on our server. They will be ready to download within a few minutes.

Faster still is to use it in audio mode. You dictate your notes. You upload to the server. Then they will be ready for you to type up when you get back to the office.

Gary, 26 November 2021