Property Management: PM software, maintenance & showings

[Thad Morton]

Hello all, I'm new to Bigger Pockets and a residential property manager in the DFW area. Our company is currently a 2 man operation and we manage about 130 doors and growing. I'm new to the business but my partner has been doing it for nearly 20 years. I'm looking for feedback and ideas regarding how other property managers and landlords handle their operation processes. Our current processes are adequate but time consuming and inefficient. As we continue to grow it is becoming more and more necessary for us to streamline our operations in order to maintain the level of service we want to provide to our property owners and tenants. We currently use an older property management software program called Tenant File, Tenant File is not a cloud based service so therefore our PM software is not connected to or integrated with any of the other software or web services we use. We have a plan in place to move to a cloud based service at the first of the year in 2018 but we have yet to settle on which platform to go with. Our maintenance operations are similarly "disconnected" and are mostly handled by having tenants call in or email in requests and then we dispatch out the individual requests to different handy men or vendors, repairs/work orders are mostly tracked via a "paper process" so things sometimes fall through the cracks. So, getting to my questions..... I'd like to hear some recommendations regarding affordable or "best bang for the buck" cloud based PM programs and whether or not those programs offer integrated maintenance management with vendor integration. I'd also like to hear thoughts about ShowMojo and similar companies. We currently handle all of our own listings, scheduling, phone calls, showings etc. and it's become fairly overwhelming even though we do use our local MLS, Zillow etc. I don't see self-showings in our near future but a more automated showing/scheduling/phone service would be a huge time saver. I've done a lot of research on all of the above topics but don't have the "hands on" experience with them just yet so I'm hoping to get some honest "we've used this and it's great" or "this is a waste of time" type feedback. I'm sure there are other options out there that I haven't even considered so feel free to throw out processes or systems that you use. Sorry for the lengthy post and I'd like to thank everyone in advance for their feedback.