Asset Management: The overlooked tech that your smart multifamily community needs ASAP

By: Kathryn Casna

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If you’ve added IoT (Internet of Things) solutions to your multifamily communities, you might be tempted to leave it at that. After all, smart apartments, access control and other proptech upgrades have likely made your life easier, boosted site team efficiency and improved the resident experience.

But if you want to fully digitize property management and extend the life of your assets, your next smart step is investing in the right asset management solution.

Why owners love smart asset management

The right asset management solution can cut costs and boost efficiency across your portfolio — all while allowing you to centralize more of your operations and scale as you grow.

Boost your NOI

Large communities and portfolios have countless assets to keep track of, plus varied labor needs and unique challenges. A smart asset management solution can help reduce costs through QR-code asset tracking. Once you establish accurate tracking, you can automate repeated tasks and preventative maintenance, too.

Accurate reporting and insights

When you can better track the age, location and condition of your assets, you can better predict capital expenditures, repair costs and maintenance needs. Make better business decisions while reducing inefficiencies during audits and inspections.

Centralize and scale

If you own multiple communities but your operations aren’t centralized as much as they can be, then you’re not maximizing your NOI. While you’ll always need on-site maintenance teams to keep your assets in good shape, the right technology can help you centralize labor coordination and share equipment across multiple locations as needed.

Why maintenance teams love smart asset management

While many of your other operations may already be digitized, your maintenance team is solidly grounded in the physical world, caring for your assets and communities in a hands-on way, every day. But that doesn’t mean they can’t benefit from a more digitized workflow.

Better budgeting and scheduling

You never know when any piece of equipment will fail, but you can get better at predicting life expectancies when you have more information about each asset. The key is tracking assets individually, then applying powerful data analysis to zoom out and see trends over time. Once you can predict failures with reasonable accuracy, you can plan for them.

Arriving on the job more prepared

No matter how detailed a service request, experienced technicians know to expect surprises. These techs also know that the more information you have about the assets in question, the better you can prepare to solve the issue. Before ever setting foot in a unit, your maintenance team can see the age and service history of appliances, fixtures and other assets.

Why site teams love smart asset management

Maintenance teams often lean on site teams to help them stay organized, but these tasks can take away from your site team’s productivity. A smart asset management solution empowers maintenance teams to keep themselves on track while freeing up time and energy for the rest of your on-site staff.

Integrate and go

The best smart asset management solutions help power the other solutions you’ve invested in, like your PMS. Full integration makes it easier to share data across platforms, bringing additional data analysis tools and saving your site teams time.

Imagine being able to predict whether an appliance needs replacing in a unit that’s not ready for a new tenant before the current tenant moves out. That could help your leasing team schedule tours and better predict occupancy levels.

Customize inspections and audits

Inspections and audits can interrupt the daily workflow of your site teams, taking them away from revenue-driving tasks like leasing and improving the resident experience. And your team probably performs the same actions each and every time you have an inspection or audit. So why not automate those actions?

A smart asset management system allows you to build customized templates and procedures so inspections are efficient and occur the same way each time.

Why residents love smart asset management

Some of the toughest barriers to a great resident experience are maintenance issues. After all, service requests usually mean an asset isn’t functioning properly. But with the right asset management solution, you can prevent many of the worst issues and close out maintenance requests faster.

Everything works better

Preventative maintenance is critical for resident satisfaction — and resident retention. If you can predict failures before they inconvenience a renter, you help them see your community as a comfortable, convenient place to call home. The more data and insights your asset management platform can give you, the better you’ll be at creating that comfort and convenience.

Problems are solved faster

No existing asset management system can predict all failures (though we’re working on that here at SmartRent). But when issues do happen, knowing more about the assets in question can help your teams speed to resolution. It can help your technicians set more accurate expectations, because they’re more likely to know whether they’ll need to repair or replace the equipment. That means less down time for the resident and more time just living life.

Asset management for the win

IoT hardware hogs the proptech spotlight, and rightfully so. But if you want to protect all those smart tech assets while getting the most out of them, leveling up your asset management is critical. A smart work management platform is how your physical assets meet your digitized management style. With it comes greater efficiency, more centralized operations and happier residents — all of which can boost your bottom line.