Online Rental Property Management Software Development

Online Rental Property Management Software Development

The Challenge

The client wanted the software to ease property management burdens on small and independent landlords.

 

The challenge was to conceptualize and develop a simple, streamlined management tool for smaller property owners – and to offer it for free. The tool needed to be able to manage marketing for the property, encourage on-time payments by tenants, keep track of transactions, and handle maintenance requests.

 

The goal of the project was to ultimately offer two separate personalized dashboards – one for landlords and one for tenants. The tool needed to eliminate landlords’ need to keep paper records, track down late payments, or personally deal with maintenance requests. Once functional, landlords would never again need to keep paper records on tenants, leases, payments, invoices, or maintenance requests. The software would also remind tenants of due dates and automatically tack on fees for late payment.

 

For tenants, the tool would be where they signed leases, referred back to signed documents, and renewed a lease when applicable.

 

In addition to managing day-to-day contact between landlords and tenants, the software also needed to be able to generate periodic and on-demand reports, searchable property, tenant name, date range, invoice type, and payment type. The payment of rent via e-checks and credit cards needed to be done securely, and as well as making possible instant payment requests, auto-generating receipts, and tracking of payments over time.

Design

We worked closely with independent landlords and renters to design an application that would solve their problems.

 

Working closely with stakeholders quickly taught us why traditional, big-budget property management tools weren’t working for the people who actually used them.

 

Small and mid-sized property managers needed straight forward, easy-to-use systems, not the over-designed, feature-rich options that were on the market at the time. Existing property management tools also charged exorbitant fees, making them unreasonable options for the often budget-conscious independent landlords seeking our help.

 

We ultimately built a lightweight, simplistic property management tool that only included the most essential features. The interface was built to be a rich internet application and AngularJS7 simplified the testing and development process. ASP.NET Web API was deployed to run the users’ requests over the originating server, speeding up response times over an alternative HTML view.

 

Landlords expressed concerns about privacy and data security, so robust cryptographic algorithm AES128 was deployed for all communications between the server, landlords, and tenants. Two-factor authentication at each login implemented an additional layer of security.

The Solution

The web-based application we created allows landlords to communicate electronically with prospective tenants. Applications are sorted online and references are checked with ease.

 

The software serves as a 360-degree property management tool perfect for small mid-sized inventories. Problems with managing and notifying of lease renewals, repair requests, and other vital communications are easily solved, and landlords can quickly get statistical insights into their rental properties.

 

The application is a modern, scalable service for independent landlords and tenants that simplifies the process, ultimately saving both landlords and tenants time, money, and effort.