Not enough property owners and managers spend time optimizing the make-ready process
If you’ve been in enough leasing offices, you’ve seen make-ready boards on the wall covered in scribbles. Someone is usually standing there and figuring out what unit should be turned next, and who needs the new refrigerator, and who needs carpets cleaned.
Executing against the make-ready process efficiently is very difficult. And a clear and efficient process for your make-readies is really important for a number of reasons.
Why the Make-Ready Process is So Important
One, each day that a unit hasn’t been turned and isn’t back on the market is a day that your property is losing rental income. Two, if you aren’t documenting the move-out process to begin with properly, that’s costing the property money.
And if you aren’t capturing resident charges and damage charges and putting them into a format that you can defend in court and getting that format out to the resident in a timely fashion, that will cost the property money.
In the past, the best tool for this was the whiteboard on the wall. You’d scribble in everything that every unit needs. Or you’d take your clipboard into the unit itself and try to mark down everything that looked wrong. Then you’d add the damage fees that go along with that.
Also, in the past, this process was so painful. Teams would have to go into every single room in these units. They’d check off things that were wrong or needed to be replaced. And there were always disagreements with the residents. It was your word against theirs, and you didn’t have documentation to prove it one way or the other.
Those days are behind us now. All you have to do now is take your mobile phone out in the field.
The Software Solution
Software can solve all of those issues. You can do your move-in inspections and capture the state of that unit before that resident moves in. This way you have photo evidence of what’s changed when they move out.
With software, you can capture that information and even get residents to sign off on it. And that information goes immediately into a statement of deposit accounting or a resident ledger. And you can produce the receipt that you need to provide the resident.
It’s an easier and almost beautiful process. You’re making life a lot easier and you’re getting more reliable and defensible data. You can also secure more resident damage dollars than you’ve been able to do before. All of that helps the bottom line.
The Make-Ready Phase
Then you move into the make-ready phase, and rather than trying to track everything on a whiteboard, you just look down at your device. You know what unit you’re supposed to be in because the app shows you. It shows you what needs to be done and what’s been done already.
Finally, you’ll get real-time updates on a digital make-ready board. You can see the status of every unit across the property. You’ll know when people are in there cleaning, or painting, or replacing carpets.
In the end, you’ll end up with faster turns and less haggling about where your maintenance teams should be at that moment, and what needs to be done next.
You’ll know, for example, which carpets to clean. And you’ll know which carpets to replace more easily than you have before. You can standardize turning those units in three days or five days and get them back on the market to make you money.
Leonardo247 really is the best tool to help relieve you of all of the pressure and the stress that goes into these make-ready processes. The app takes you out of the role of administering, and scheduling, and tracking, and reassigning tasks.
All you have to do is ask your teams to execute. People can just get about the business of doing their jobs, and not trying to figure out what that black scribble on the make-ready board really means.
Start optimizing your make-ready process by requesting a Leonardo247 demo today.