Custom Email Address For Each Unit?

Question

As far as automating as much as possible and treating the properties as a professional business, is using custom email address for each unit (like: 123StreetA at company dot com*) taking it too far?

Some benefits are you don't have to worry about the tenants not including their location if they email you from a different address and changing PMs won't require changing your contact info.  Some drawbacks are being impersonal and not having a generic business card for everything.

I've moved around a lot and have never come across a management company doing this.  I'm going to close on my first property on Monday and am trying to setup everything so it can easily scale as I gain more units.  I'm also setting up a virtual address and phone number.  I probably should have done everything in a LLC, but figuring all that out on my own was a bit too much for my first property.  I know better for next time.

Any other advice is welcome too.  Thanks.

*BP post filtering won't let me format that example as a real address

Spencer Smith · Answer

@Douglas Krofcheck I'll bite on your offer to be tagged down the road :)

How has this scaled and worked out for you?  Do you still have multiple email addresses and/or domains for each property?  What does your structure look like?

Timothy Church · Answer

@Douglas Krofcheck now that I manage more properties and manage for other people, I have a software which takes care of this. Initially it was just a week of building the website. Thankfully I enjoy HTML/CSS writing so it wasn't bad. It could be something you could hire out to a web designer fairly easily. Then just set up a secure portal to your server to transfer documents and a way of taking online payments.

Douglas Krofcheck · Answer

Thanks everyone for your thoughts.  I closed on my first property this past week! (house hacking a dual building 3-unit).

I'm going ahead with 1 email per unit and another 1 per building.  The point being any bills, service accounts, repairs, etc... can be performed from the related accounts which could make it easier manage everything.  Or it might make everything harder.  I'm not certain so I'll try it out while I'm small.  In theory I'm going to DIY my own property management software.  I know that has a poor time-cost analysis compared to learning an existing product, but I'm a software engineer by trade and enjoy building that sort of thing.  Eventually I want to do everything through a web portal but I'm not there yet.  @Timothy Church, is a 3rd party providing your portal access or is it all custom made?

I got my domain and email accounts through 1and1.  They have an excellent intro offer of around $1 a month for the first year.  For anyone reading this in a year or two, feel free to tag me and ask if the multiple accounts worked out or not.

@Steve Babiak, I've used that + email feature in the past and had to blow up on me.  A lot of mailing lists will accept those email address, but their unsubscribe input box say the address is invalid so you can never unsubscribe.  Granted it's easy to create an email rule to delete all those emails, but it's still annoying.

John Thedford · Answer

This sounds like complicating your business. Keep it simple. I have three email addresses and that is two too many.

Timothy Church · Answer

Personally what I like to do is have all communication come through a personalized website. I have my property management email that I use generally but for each property I have a dedicated page.

My tenants are able to log in from my general page to access information. They are able to pull up a copy of the lease and other documents, pay their rent, and request repairs/general inquiries. All of these get forwarded to me through the system along with any additional information such as address and tenants name.

This way the tenant feels that they have a personal way to contact me and I am able to keep everything neat and organized. I'm thinking of adding check boxes for repairs, general inquiries, and other things so the email gets cc'ed to the repair man or other relevant parties.

Steve Babiak · Answer

I know this works for gmail, and I am told it's supposed to work for any ISP, so here goes.

I make use of the plus character '+' to use one email inbox but give out a "unique" email address when I wish to track the source of a message. So assume my base email address is like below, except I had to include spaces in there to get past the BP spam blocker (so take the spaces out when you attempt this of course):

sb_____3 @ gmail.com

I can insert a '+' and unique like so:

sb_____3+unique @ gmail.com

I can insert a '+' and BP like so:

sb_____3+BP @ gmail.com

You get the idea. I would give that email address out to whomever in writing; it could also be given by a website portal that handles subscriptions and the like.

Whether you should do that or not is not my call; whoever manages the property would have to go along with that. And mail you send normally will not have that unique decoration attached, so you would also have to deal with that somehow.

Bram Spiero · Answer

Hey there Douglas,

I think a different email per address is overkill. It'll also be a pain in the neck for your PM. Assuming your massive success he's going to have to go to 10's or 100's of different inboxes or dig around to figure out where the email was forwarded from. Why not call it customerservice AT company DOT com?

If you change PM's, simply change the password and keep the address.

As far as this being impersonal, I would argue the opposite. With an address specific email, you can tell your tenants that they are getting a dedicated email address.

Do yourself a favor and stick a picture in your avatar, you'll get better interactions when you're not a faceless gray dude with a tie.

Best of luck!