Streamlining The Lease Signing Process Using Property Management Software
Signing leases offline takes time and concerted effort. As a landlord, you have to create the lease, edit it, email it to your tenant, wait for them to review it, print it off, schedule a time for them to sign it, scan it, and then provide them with a physical copy.
The lease signing process takes longer still if you’re using the postal service.
Property management software streamlines this entire process. Prospective tenants can view and sign the lease as soon as you make it available to them.
It sounds a lot simpler, doesn’t it? But what does this process look like exactly?
In this article, we’re going to dive into the lease signing process when you use property management software.
The Process
It’s simple to switch over to managing leases through property management software. There are five main steps that will help you set things up:
- Upload Your Lease
- Allocate Roles
- Identify Lease Fields
- Share Your Lease
- Develop Templates
Step 1: Upload Your Lease
You won’t have to re-start the whole process when you move to online leases. If you used leases in the past, you can upload those to your property management software to keep using what works best for you.
Uploading documents right from your computer or cloud-based storage (OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.) is quite simple. Additionally, you can store and save as many leases as you need to on the cloud. While a variety of formats and file types do the trick, leases saved as PDF or Word documents are usually your best bet. These formats offer you the best opportunity to preserve the exact space and sizing of the original documents.
Step 2: Allocate Roles
The key question here is: Who is signing the lease? After you upload leases to the software, you need to assign roles. For example, if you’re leasing a house to two tenants, you need three roles. You would assign “Landlord” to yourself and have one extra role for each tenant. It might also be a good idea to set up a specific signing order to avoid confusion.
Step 3: Indicating Lease Fields
When it comes to formatting leases, you have many options. Beyond initial and signature fields, you’ll need to decide on the text box, checkbox, and date fields in your lease. Then, you simply drag and drop the fields to where you want them to appear in the lease. Once they’re set up, you and your tenants are ready to fill them in electronically.
It’s vital to mention that you should save your work throughout the process. Losing your progress is a headache you don’t need.
Sometimes, it might be prudent to include data validation in your lease fields. This verifies that the correct criteria for each specific text box is met. For instance, if you select an “email” validation, the information in that text box won’t be valid unless it is in an email format. And it’s just the same for “numeric” or “date” validations. Data validation is a useful method to make sure that all information is formatted accurately.
Step 4: Share Your Lease
With property management software, you can share leases right after you set them up. Make sure the correct fields are in place, be sure to save your document one more time, and then you’re good to go. Your software automatically sends a link to tenants to sign the lease via email. Unless you need to change things in the lease agreement later, you’ll never have to format the document again.
Step 5: Develop Templates
Templates are the form prior to drafts and live leases. They may be the most significant advantage of signing leases through property management software. They make it easy for you to quickly produce lease agreements and turn them over to tenants without much delay.
One of the main reasons templates are so great is because many leases fall under a similar layout. When you save the basic lease format as a template, it allows you to specify the details for specific units as drafts without changing the template for other units. Furthermore, templates allow users to create auto-fill fields, recurring fields, and much more.
With property management software, most of the time you need to spend on leases is only on the front-end. After your documents are uploaded and the fields are in place, you can continue to reuse templates for as long as you want.
Conclusion
Property management software simplifies the lease signing process. By following the five easy steps we laid out above, you’ll be up and running in no time. And you’ll love how much it streamlines your business.
