Whether you’re a host with a few short-term rental properties, a boutique hotel owner, managing a resort, or overseeing multiple properties as a property manager, you know just how much work it takes to keep everything running smoothly. Juggling reservations, check-ins, check-outs, guest access, and communications—along with countless other tasks—requires a tremendous amount of organization and coordination. As your operation grows, the complexity only increases, making it more challenging to stay on top of every detail.
At some point, it becomes necessary to streamline your operations by automating your rental management through software. Implementing a reliable property management system (PMS) or automation tools can alleviate the manual workload, simplify processes, and free up your time to focus on enhancing guest experiences and growing your business. Automation ensures that you stay organized, minimize errors, and provide efficient, high-quality service to your guests—whether you’re managing one property or many.
A Property Management System or Property Management Software (PMS) is designed to automate the day-to-day operations of your rental business, freeing you up to focus on bigger priorities like onboarding new properties, enhancing guest experiences, and driving your marketing and growth efforts.
However, with so many different types of PMS options available, it’s essential to find the one that aligns best with your business needs and goals. Not all PMS platforms are created equal—some may offer robust automation tools, while others may specialize in guest communication or financial management. To get the most out of your PMS, carefully assess your requirements, whether that’s reservation management, guest services, reporting, or something more unique to your operation. Selecting the right system can be a game-changer, enabling you to streamline your processes, improve efficiency, and scale your business effectively.
How to Choose a Property Management Software
Each PMS offers a variety of features, depending on its clients. When choosing one, look for something that will be relevant to your business. You know your pain points and what you ultimately need, and you should take your time to find one that has things that will make your job easier, without paying for extra features and frills you won’t use. For example, if you’ve got a small team, you might not want something with a comprehensive staff management tool.
With that in mind, however, don’t be too quick to dismiss a feature at the onset. Something that seems unnecessary now, could come in handy later when you try to scale your business. It’d also be a good idea to explore the PMS’s development roadmap to see what new features are on the horizon, especially if the company offers a discount for more comprehensive versions of their software.
Finally, it should be able to work with your other tools via an open API and partner with OTAs, booking channels, automation tools, and any other sites and services you rely on.
Whatever your needs may be, there are certain features that are crucial for success. Here’s what you should keep in mind:
It Should Keep Procedures Organized
Control: The ideal management system would allow you to control everything from a centralized dashboard. This would include managing all of your listings across various booking channels, as well as offer information and stats about the bookings across your portfolio, and generate reports. It should also have the capabilities to let you know how well each property is doing, as well as showing you how profitable each rental is, in comparison to others.
It should also be device agnostic, working natively on a computer and your mobile devices.
Correspondence: On top of automating daily operations, a good Property Management System (PMS) should consolidate all your correspondence into one unified inbox. This includes guest and client texts, emails, and communications from various Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) you work with. Having all your interactions in one place acts as a built-in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, allowing you to stay on top of guest communication effortlessly.
With this unified inbox, you can easily manage conversations, track feedback, and respond to reviews, ensuring no message slips through the cracks. It helps streamline your communication workflow, making it easier to maintain positive relationships with your guests, provide timely responses, and address any concerns, ultimately enhancing guest satisfaction and boosting your property’s reputation.
Automation: Finally, the right PMS for your business should offer automated processes that cover every aspect of your operation. This includes automatically prompting guests to leave reviews, sending personalized welcome and thank you emails, and ensuring seamless coordination with outsourced services like cleaning.
For example, as soon as a booking concludes, the PMS can automatically alert your cleaning team that the space is vacant and ready for turnover, ensuring quick and efficient preparations for the next guest. These automated workflows save you time and effort, eliminate manual tasks, and help maintain high standards of service and property management. By automating these crucial elements, you can focus on growing your business while ensuring everything behind the scenes runs smoothly.
It should streamline your operations
Being a property manager means that more often than not, you’re spending far too much of your time on manual, tedious tasks. This is why you need a PMS that eliminates the busy work. Your software should have the ability to create a dynamic flow of communications between yourself and your guest. This is done through automated messages. Rather than greeting every guest personally, with a copy-and-paste message, the system can create automated messages that will go out according to a set schedule, triggered by various conditions; an approaching check-in date, upon checkout, or at the midpoint of a stay during a multi-night reservation.
In tandem with automated emails, a PMS with an AI concierge service is something you should be looking for to streamline your communications. This service offers a chatbot that will answer any of the most common questions about the WiFi, local restaurants, and where the host keeps the extra blankets. If there is a question the concierge can’t answer, then it will send a notification to the host to involve them. Thus, saving you from answering the same questions repeatedly, for every booking.
A helpful PMS should also work on optimizing your listings, allowing you to adjust prices and update descriptions across all your booking channels. As well, as a property gets booked, it should also automatically block off that listing on all your partner OTAs, to avoid double booking. The idea is to avoid all that wasted time logging in and out of different booking channel portals to keep your inventory updated.
Finally, the ideal PMS should work with automating the features of the listing itself through smart technology. This is done by using tools such as keyless entry and smart locks, noise sensors, smart thermostats, and other tools that will help improve the guest experience and make less work for you.
Helps to Grow your Business
The key to being a property owner, successful host, resort manager, B&B proprietor, etc. is repeat visitors and 5-star reviews. But you can only focus on striving for those things, if you automate and outsource a lot of the mechanical and routine processes. Once your business is a well-oiled machine, you can focus on the big-picture; revenue and delivering the best possible customer experience.
At Enso Connect, our focus is on automating as many of the tools you use, into one easy dashboard. We focus on leveraging smart home devices and automated messaging to help make the management of your property as effortless as possible.
Contact us to find out how to put your home on autopilot.
