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News Flash For Property Managers: See How SMS Messaging Saves You Money

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Often people think SMS messaging costs a lot of money. Particularly when they plan on sending thousands of messages. So in this blog I want to walk through an example of how much money SMS messaging can actually save property managers and housing associations.

Our example association, XYZ Property, manages about 5,000 tenants. On average they have about 500 calls for repairs per month, and 25% of tenants forget about the scheduled repair appointment. So 125 times per month, the maintenance staff travel to the flat only to find the tenant isn’t available to let them in and they can’t complete their repair. Each trip they make costs you £25.

£125 x 25 = £3125

A little maths shows how much those no-show appointments cost you as the property manager. Every month you lose £3,125, and every year £37,500.

Now, let’s look at the cost of sending an SMS appointment reminder to those 500 tenants requesting a repair. Our current rate for a SMS message is 3.5p. Again a little maths:

3.5p x 500 = 1,750p = £17.50.

Notifying the tenants would cost £17.50. Assuming all tenants were then available for their appointment time, or perhaps rescheduled to a better time, XYZ Property would save £3,107.5 per month, or £37,290 per year!

SMS messaging can save thousands of pounds per year just in no-show repair appointments. Imagine if you used it to notify tenants just before their rent was due. This small reminder could reduce the number of arrears you have each month. You could do a similar exercise estimating how much it costs you to chase down each tenant in arrears, how much the SMS messages would cost, and how much you would save by sending SMS reminders of when rent is due. I bet you could save thousands again.

You could also use SMS messaging to contact prospective tenants when a property becomes available and thereby leave properties empty for less time. As well as bringing more rent this would cut down on admin time, especially if you use SMS to coordinate viewings.

Even small to moderate size property and housing associations can leverage SMS messaging easily and save significant amounts of time and money. So next time you hear someone say SMS messaging is too expensive, you can tell them it’s too expensive not to use it!

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