Real Estate Technology from a Tenant’s Perspective

Technology is rapidly changing every aspect of our lives. From being able to create and change dinner reservations with the OpenTable app, to setting my DVR while boarding my flight; almost everything can be done from a smart phone or tablet. In fact, I get extremely irritated when I cannot do something from my phone.

This really hit home as I tried to contact the real estate company in charge of my apartment building. My request was relatively simple, one of our drains had clogged and I needed it fixed. What followed was anything but simple. After searching for the paperwork I was given when I moved in and locating the sole phone number on the sheet, I got someone on the phone. Surprisingly, it took speaking to three individuals and being put on hold before I was finally able to put in the work request.  Almost as an afterthought, the person on the phone told me about the building’s website. After trying to pull it up on my iPad, it gave me an error message saying it wasn’t configured for mobile browsing. There was a place to submit a work order, but that required me to pull out my old computer, wait an eternity for it to boot up, and then submit a work order.

At first I thought this was just a problem with my specific real estate company; however, It turns out that this is pretty common across rental agencies. The underlying theme is slow adoption of technology. They should be enabling tenants to be more self sufficient. From paperless and fully searchable leases to mobile apps/websites, giving tenants the tools to solve their own problems makes everyone happier and more efficient. If you doubt me, a quick survey of your tenants will reinforce how much people prefer to handle tasks on their smart devices; it’s just ‘smart’ business.