From Operator to Automator – How to scale and sustain your real estate business with Monday.com

When I first started doing real estate investing I remember doing EVERYTHING myself (well, everything except the actual renovations, because I’ve discovered that although I both love, and am good at, demolishing things I really can’t put it together to make it beautiful).

I encourage everyone to do this in the beginning of your real estate journey as it’s the only real way to learn all the details and nuances of investing.  Once you become a master operator in each of these areas, however, it’s now time to take it to the next level - hiring and training someone else to do all these tasks for you.

But if you want to scale and grow a sustainable and profitable business, you can’t just throw more people at your problems – you have to be able to optimize the systems and resources you have and the only way to do this is with automation.

Our company uses an online software platform called Monday.com for all aspects of our business including project management, property management, administration and finance.  It can also be used for a wide variety of other tasks such as creative and design work, marketing, sales, CRM, human resource, and a host of other operations.

Monday.com gives you the ability to essentially custom create your own software but without having to be a professional software engineer or knowing how to code.  There are also many other different pieces of software and websites that integrate flawlessly with Monday.com.

Here are 3 examples of how we use Monday.com in our business:

(1)   A prospective tenant applies on our website – this information automatically goes into Monday.com.  An email is automatically sent to the prospective tenant letting them know their application was received.  As the application is processed, a text message is automatically sent to prospective tenant to let them know at what stage of the application process they are in.

(2)   Every time a new property and renovation project is entered into Monday.com, a list of automatic tasks are generated and assigned to the appropriate individual, which forms part of their daily tasks.  At the end of each day, a summary list of all the work that was completed by my employees is automatically emailed to me, which also shows progress on long-term projects.

(3)   As utility bills are entered into a Monday.com database, if a water bill is 10% higher than what it was the previous month, then our maintenance person is automatically notified via email/text that there may a possible leak at that particular property to inspect.

The possibilities of how you can use this software are truly endless.  This online software is available on a subscription basis, with the cost depending on the number of users, and can be cancelled at any time – which sure beats having to pay $50,000 or more to have a custom software built for you to do the same thing.