Why Tech and Real Estate Are a Winning Combination in the Rental Market

These days, being a successful rental property manager or landlord requires a level of tech-savviness, both to attract renters and to conduct daily business.

Mike DelPrete

Real Estate Tech Strategist

Unlike the real estate sales market, there’s no central database, such as MLS, where all rentals are listed. Therefore, ensuring your listings are visible is the first crucial step property managers need to take to find renters for their properties. This is according to Mike DelPrete, a real estate tech strategist.

Property managers can do this by ensuring their listings are present everywhere people look — and that is mainly online these days. Some of the main online destinations for prospective renters include Zumper, Zillow, and Apartments.com, DelPrete says.  

“If you’re a consumer and you want to be thinking about renting, you want to look for everything, right? So, people will look in multiple places. They want to know that they’re seeing all the available inventory,” he notes.

“[These websites] work because they have a lot of eyeballs, a lot of people looking, and a lot of listings. And then that just feeds in and of itself. If you’re a property manager or a landlord and you want to advertise, you go to the big sites that have all the consumers on it already.”

With over 1 million apartments, houses, condos, and townhomes for rent, there’s plenty of options to choose from on Apartments.com.

Using online tools

The second key step is understanding how to take advantage of online tools to facilitate everything that goes into the rental agreement process.

“That can be tools to help you do security checks, tenancy screening, security deposits, or collecting rent,” says DelPrete, who noted that having a central dashboard that collects and helps you monitor these elements could be helpful.

The same goes for advertising properties when you’re in the tenant searching phase. “If you have five properties and you’re advertising several of them for rent, you could be dealing with dozens of people, so you need a CRM (customer relationship management) behind all that.” “You need a way to automate some of those processes,” he adds. “And that’s the big innovation — the big area where technology can help and has been making the job easier for those landlords and property managers.”