Rental Property Management with Turbotenant

Alex Reeves: Hey everyone, so today we're exploring the intersection of real estate investing and technology with a special guest from TurboTenant, Harrison Stevens. Harrison, I appreciate you coming on today. TurboTenant has become a go-to platform for landlords and investors looking to streamline their rental management. It's great to have you here.

Harrison Stevens: Yeah, thank you for having me.

Alex: So for starters, Harrison, TurboTenant has gained a lot of popularity among landlords and real estate investors. Could you start by telling us what sets TurboTenant apart from other property management platforms, and then maybe what kind of landlord TurboTenant caters to?

Harrison: I think the answer to both those questions is the same, which is we're trying to cater towards landlords that own one to ten properties — we can go up to 50 or 100 if needed — but the needs of somebody that is trying to do it themselves as a landlord, invest in properties, manage themselves, and keep as much of the profit as they can is a much different product than the enterprise-level landlord software that you need to have 300 properties for. A lot of our software is built around getting you set up for success for your first property and then adding one more and then another one, or if you do have five properties, making it easy to add them and manage them without the need of account managers or phone support to set things up. It should just work. We always think of it that way — if you can set up a property and be successful without needing any documentation or education for how to use the software itself, then we're doing right by our customers.

Alex: That's great. You mentioned simplifying the day for landlords. Managing real estate investment properties can be pretty complex, especially with how many options there are nowadays. What would you say are some of the most popular tools on TurboTenant that help those landlords simplify their day-to-day operations?

Harrison: My favorite tool — and it should be every landlord's — is collecting rent. We make it really easy to collect rent, and there are a lot of ways to collect rent out there, but most people these days expect to be able to pay online and expect it to be easy for everyone to transact those payments. So with us, you can pay rent as a tenant by credit card, debit card, or through bank account transfer, and for landlords, bank account transfer back to your bank account. We automate that, so you can do autopay as a tenant and be sure that your payments will come to the landlord every month on the day they're supposed to. If you're a landlord, you can also set up automatic late fees, which is just a really awkward conversation otherwise. If you own a few properties, you probably know your tenants by name, there's some sort of personal relationship, and you feel for them — like, I understand you're a day or two late, things happen. But if you have software taking that personalization away in a good way to help you run a successful business, it makes you more successful, sets better expectations for your tenants, and the relationship just continues to get better because there are such clear expectations.

Besides that, what we're really good at is finding you a tenant, because without a tenant you can't get rent and your business is going to suffer. When you list a property on TurboTenant, we automatically provide you with insights on how to create a great listing. Every property you list, you are marketing it in some capacity, and with what we've learned from 700,000 landlords, we're going to guide you through your property. There are different things you can say and ways to say it that will garner more attention but also protect you from saying the wrong things — you don't want to discriminate against people, etc. There's a certain number of pictures that lead to a higher chance of success, and if you allow pets you're actually adding a much larger pool of potential renters.

Once you have the property ready, we'll syndicate it out and list it on dozens of other major sites — some of the biggest in the industry: Apartments.com, Homes.com, Redfin, and Craigslist integration is now one of our biggest places for finding leads for our landlords. All of those leads come back to TurboTenant so you can manage it all in one place. If you aren't using us, you're going to go list it on Apartments.com, list it on Redfin, list it on all these different places, and then check every single one of them for leads. All of it comes into one place here so that you can manage it effectively. Once you get the right potential tenant, we help you automatically screen them, go through the application process, and even write a lease for you for your state or specific city so that you're compliant, you're protected, and the expectations with your tenant are set from the get-go. If you're cutting corners early, more corners could be cut throughout the entire process. The expectation that you're running a really well-buttoned-up business leads to better experiences for the tenant and for you throughout the entire time you're working together.

Alex: Harrison, you really just highlighted two of the biggest parts of being a landlord — collecting rent and attracting high-quality tenants. If you don't have those two, being a landlord is pretty hard. So I highly recommend collecting rent and finding great tenants, and it sounds like you're really good at both. Hey, so whether someone is a new investor or managing multiple properties, having the right tech stack is obviously so important, and partnerships are key. How does TurboTenant integrate with partners like Steadily or others in the industry?

Harrison: We talked about a lot of things that we do well, and there are times where it's just better to partner with someone who already is the expert. That's why we chose Steadily, and we have quite a few other partners that just fill gaps where software we create isn't the best choice. If we're partnering with really great businesses that are experts, then landlords get the best of everything in my opinion. With the Steadily integration, we collect all the information, and we actually negotiated and created a plan that's more tailored towards our types of landlords — the smaller landlords. I think everyone would agree you don't want to be over-insured, and that's what we focused on: what do we think the average landlord on our platform needs? That's the plan that you start with when the two companies work together. We pass a lot of the information on, we make it easy, and we let you know at the right time. Now you have a property, now you have a tenant, you've got a lease, you're ready to move them in — now's the time to start protecting everything. It's hard to pitch insurance when you don't have a tenant, so timing is really important, and we built the right timing to make an effective pitch when you're ready to make that decision.

Alex: You hit the nail on the head — this process is so timing-oriented. One thing has to be completed before the next can start. It sounds like you guys do a good job of helping landlords get from point A to point B a little more clearly, which is huge. So Harrison, looking ahead, what innovations or updates can we expect to see from TurboTenant, and from a macro standpoint, where do you see the property management space evolving and what role do you see TurboTenant playing in it?

Harrison: As technology continues to invest in this space — everyone is talking about AI — I think there's a lot of things we've already done with AI. I already mentioned the ways we help with your listing, but one of the biggest pain points in property management besides finding a tenant and making sure they pay on time is maintenance. I've been a landlord for over a decade now, and maintenance requests never come at a convenient time. It's always late at night or in the middle of a meeting. And half the time those conversations were just "did you try these three things?" and then I'd get a text an hour later saying yeah, it's fixed now.

What we're looking into is this: every time someone pays rent on the platform today, we ask how things are going. That feedback loop is unusual in the tenant-landlord relationship. If things aren't going well or there's a problem that might be small today, it's a lot easier to say it on a platform than to call up a landlord and make a whole big deal out of it. Finding a problem early is really important because it's just a small fix versus a disaster — a leaking toilet is a big deal, but a leaking bathroom that's leaking into another floor is a major problem. So we're investing more in maintenance. We also have a partner for that called Lula, who can help facilitate repairs. But why not have those conversations run through AI, where if someone says "hey, I have a leaking toilet," our AI asks some follow-up questions and then suggests some things for them to try? The tenant gets instant feedback and can do something about it right now. We might be able to help solve the problem just by providing some troubleshooting steps, and if we can't, we've now collected a ton of information through that process. When the landlord goes to hire, in this example, a plumber, they have all of those questions already answered, and the plumber can come in with a whole book of what's going on. There are fewer surprises when they walk in the door, which gives a higher probability that the right person was sent and the problem can be solved on the first try. Sending someone who can't fix it means you've got to find another person and the whole process is delayed. All the landlords we talk to are just trying to create a great experience because they believe a great experience leads to a happy tenant, which leads to the tenant renewing, and the business just keeps thriving. They're interested in solving these problems — let's just make it easier for them. I think AI could be a really great way to make this a more streamlined process.

Our software also automates a lot of the bookkeeping for you. Any transactions that come into your bank account that have to do with your rental property, it can help automatically tag them and guide you through how to create efficient books. A lot of people look at bookkeeping as something to clean up in December, but if you do it consistently throughout the year your bookkeeping experience is much easier, and when you hand those books over to your accountant it's going to cost a lot less because they're spending time giving you advice rather than trying to clean everything up. By automatically tagging things it just makes it so much easier, and we guide you along the way — "hey, we think this is what this expense is, is this correct?" — and that education happens naturally as we help automate your books throughout the year.

Alex: From what I'm hearing, I would say don't wait to file until April 15.

Harrison: I'd recommend consistency. You want to have your books done as early as possible in January and then hand them over to your accountant to file your taxes. The longer you wait, the harder it gets. And if all of your rent is paid through our platform and all of your transactions happen through the same bank account, it gets a lot easier to categorize and automate the process.

Our software is great for midterm rentals — three months or more, up to a year or 18 months. REI Hub, which is the accounting company we acquired, can actually digest and parse Airbnb PDFs and VRBO and create books from that. It would be better for you to go to reihub.net and buy directly through them if you don't need all the software for managing midterm and long-term rentals with us. We'll be building TurboTenant Accounting, which is REI Hub, where you can sign up on TurboTenant — it's possible but it's a little messy right now, where you sign up for rental property management and then buy the REI Hub software through us. Or just go to reihub.net directly — there's a trial. It works similarly to how you might set up email rules: Home Depot is probably a repair expense, rent payment from this place is probably rent, mortgage payment out is probably mortgage. It tracks all your incoming and outgoing expenses, guides you along the way, and if you can upload PDFs from short-term rental sites, it should be able to parse them and save a ton of work for you.

Alex: I love hearing that. That sounds great from an insurance partner's perspective — basically what you're doing is helping mitigate a lot of risk for those landlords. Oftentimes a small maintenance request, if it's not taken care of, turns into a major claim on an insurance policy. I'm absolutely loving what you're saying. Thank you so much, Harrison, for joining us today. It's exciting to see how TurboTenant is helping landlords and real estate investors take control of their property management. For our listeners looking to streamline their rental process, be sure to check out TurboTenant and all the great features they offer. And don't forget to subscribe to Invest Smart with Steadily for more tips on growing and protecting your real estate investments. Thanks for coming on, Harrison — appreciate it.