Remember the days of paper rent receipts, wall-to-wall filing cabinets stuffed to the brim, and hand-written maintenance job completion forms? Yeah, neither do we... just!

 

Technology has stormed the property management scene, transforming it from a dusty paper trail into a slick, digital oasis (at least, some parts...). So, strap on your VR goggles, enter the Propverse, and explore how tech has reshaped the rental landscape and shaped Ultralets.

 

Ultralets has always prided itself on its digital advantage, pushing itself to the bleeding edge with software and equipment to make its operations and processes as smooth as possible for our colleagues and clients. We've made significant investments in systems and technologies that contribute to the success of our clients and customers daily.

 

Back in Easter of 2021, we brought on Ollie as our Digital Development Lead. Working across all departments, his support was crucial in introducing and implementing new systems and processes to enhance the efficiency of the business. Flash forward to 2024, now our IT Project Manager, Ollie has countless system improvements and software rollouts under his belt, including managing data acquisition and migration in the multiple business acquisitions we've had over the last few years.

"When I joined Ultralets, I was immediately impressed with their set-up. They had high-quality equipment, and a commitment to push their boundaries, not being afraid to shake things up with new systems.

 

I could see areas within the business that could benefit from refinement and digitalisation. I immediately got to work presenting concepts and developing new methods of meeting the needs of our clients in a more streamlined way.

 

Credit goes out to the whole team for being so receptive and eager to adopt and learn new systems that will not only benefit themselves but most importantly, our clients too."

 

 

So what have these Digital Discoveries, these IT Ideas, these Technological Treats (...shall I stop?) been? Let's break down some of the key breakthroughs in our suite of advancements.

 

We've found that out-of-the-box property tech just doesn't cut the mustard for our needs. It's either self-contained bank accounts that hold your money, leaving you at the mercy of their pricing structure and fees on transactions, or it's over-complicated systems with hundreds of features that only work to slow down the rent collection and payments process.

 

 

We created a fully functioning accounting system that develops tenant rent accounts, landlord statements AND contractor/maintenance work invoices. This system is fully customisable and continues to adapt to our needs as the team discover new ways to streamline our processes. We had a few landlords ask us to provide them with end-of-year statements, before these requests we couldn't create these. We saw the value in being able to provide our clients with these on requests, so we developed the feature ourselves. No waiting around for third-party companies to put the request in the development log, we saw an opportunity to improve the experience for our clients and we took it. You can read more about that here.

 

Customer relationship management, CRM for short, is a pivotal element of running our business with context and continuity. We built a CRM that works for us using low-code platforms, allowing us to record and present relevant, accurate and high-quality information to our colleagues. This allows for seamless note-taking and consistent record-keeping that makes addressing the needs of our clients much easier, with an audit trail to see who was taking what action with which client at all times of the day.

 

We don't just develop these systems for ourselves, last year we made the biggest advancement to our well-established client portal since its inception. We turned it from a two-dimensional login to access statements, into a three-dimensional support portal. Clients can log in and see their statements, access support contacts for all aspects of their property management journey with us, and find direct access to our exclusive investment portal to find new and upcoming investment opportunities to expand their portfolios. We put together an article exploring the new portal, check it out.

 

Our focus isn't only on improving the experience for our landlords, we also put a great deal of focus on making our tenants' lives easier. Take our maintenance management tool, FixFlo, for example. This platform enables our tenants to easily find the issue they're having through a graphic and text-based reporting journey, available in many languages. These immediately filter through to our maintenance team ready to be assessed, addressed and assigned to one of our highly skilled maintenance engineers. You can read more about this system here.

 

 

We also utilise Inventory Software with InventoryHive, this enables us to create professional inventory and inspection reports easily and efficiently, sending them off for a confirmatory signature straight to the tenant, and securely stored digitally for our records. Want to understand more about the importance of high-quality, detailed reports? Read more here.

 

 

Continued business development and growth in our industry create new opportunities to continue refining systems and introducing new software to take our Customer Experience (CX) to new heights. Watch this space as we get stuck into this New Year, we can't wait to show you what we get up to 🧑🏻‍💻

 

Got some suggestions on how we can improve our service or things you'd like to see as we develop? Let Ollie know, drop him an email at ollie@ultralets.co.uk ✉️