Building a Tenant Application

The most crucial part of property management is having properties to manage. And there can only be properties to manage if there are tenants to fill those properties. And the only way to get tenants is via tenant applications. Therefore, building the best and most accessible tenant application is the most important thing to help your property management business flourish!

What Do You Need?

The first step to building out an application is deciding what information is needed from applicants! Some things, like name and contact information, are pretty obvious and necessary, but there’s a lot that can be customized to your specific needs or wants. You also will want to pay attention if there is any specific information that is required to have by your city or state, as collecting everything you need now decreases the time you need to spend running around after applicants to get all your necessary information. The great thing about using an online property management system is that you can create multiple different applications, so if you manage buildings in different states or if you manage some residential properties as well as some commercial properties, you can split them up to tailor to the specific tenant pool you’re looking for. Things like employment, references, vehicle information, emergency contacts can all be good things to have, but you may want to know things that aren’t universal, and apply only to your buildings. By building an application rather than taking a generic one from somewhere online, you are able to tailor both the information and the organization of that information to help you make the most informed decisions when deciding on tenants!

Application Creation

Once you have the ideas of all the information you want, it’s time to start building the application! With online property management platforms, you can create this application yourself, or with Property Matrix, provide our support team with the information and specifications and let them do the heavy lifting! Whichever way you prefer, you’re able to build out an application that is set up exactly to your liking. Do you want to have the references be the first thing you see? Do you want every new set of information to be on a new page for maximum visibility? Do you want to group vehicle and drivers license information together? By building your own application, you can set up the organization of the application however you see fit, making the platform and the application work for you, not the other way around!

Application Fees and Applying

Once your application is all set up to your liking, it’s time to post the application online! You can do so on the building websites that you can get set up from online property management systems, and potential tenants will easily be able to find and fill out the information. It is here where you can also set an application fee for your applicants! This is useful if you want to run credit or criminal checks on your applicants, as the fee will cover those expenses and then some. You can set this to your liking, and can also change that for each building you manage, so you can have different ones set up depending on a variety of factors. Once your application is all good to go, applicants can fill it out and these new ‘leads’ will be sent to the digital property management system for you to review in one easy place! 

From Applicant to Tenant

Once these applications are in place and available online, you should see applicants start flowing in. Now is the time that you can review these applications, and begin the process of converting these applicants into actual tenants! At Property Matrix, we strive to make this process of creating and posting rental applications as easy and simple as possible, letting you have full customization and control over everything, while taking away some of the difficulties of application creation. Schedule a demo with Property Matrix today to see how to enhance your tenant application process!