Property management has undergone an enormous digital transformation.
Paper files have become cloud-based records. Emails are stored against properties. Repairs can be logged through online portals. Compliance dates can be tracked automatically. Landlords and tenants can access information without necessarily picking up the phone.
There is no question that technology has improved the industry.
But there is another question worth asking.
Has all this technology actually made property management easier to manage?
Spend any time talking to Property Managers and you will still hear remarkably familiar frustrations.
They are chasing contractors for updates. Waiting for landlords to approve quotes. Responding to tenants asking what is happening. Searching through emails and notes for previous conversations. Keeping mental lists of the things they need to remember to check again tomorrow.
The information may now be digital.
But in many cases, the Property Manager is still the person responsible for making everything move.
Recording work isn’t the same as reducing it
For years, one of property technology’s biggest objectives has been creating better recording systems.
And rightly so. Good records matter enormously in an industry where numerous people can be involved in a single property and where the consequences of missing something can be significant.
But recording work and reducing work are two different things.
Consider something as routine as a maintenance issue.
A tenant reports a problem. The Property Manager records it and contacts a contractor. Nothing happens, so the Property Manager chases.
A quote eventually arrives and is sent to the landlord. The landlord doesn’t respond, so the Property Manager chases again.
Approval arrives, the contractor needs to be instructed, an appointment arranged and the tenant updated.
At almost every stage, technology may have successfully recorded what happened.
But the Property Manager has still had to chase, check and remember what needs to happen next.
Everything is digital.
Yet the Property Manager remains the workflow engine.
The hidden workload of waiting
This is where an important part of the Property Manager’s workload can be overlooked.
It isn’t always the task itself that consumes the time. It’s everything surrounding it.
Sending an email takes seconds. Remembering that nobody replied three days later is another responsibility entirely.
A contractor saying, “I’ll get back to you tomorrow” creates a future action. A landlord being sent a quote creates another. A tenant waiting for an appointment creates another.
Multiply those small dependencies across hundreds of properties and dozens of live maintenance cases and an enormous amount of operational complexity starts to appear.
Property Managers aren’t simply managing tasks.
Increasingly, they are managing everyone else’s next move.
And much of that work remains surprisingly manual.
From systems of record to systems of action
Perhaps this represents the next stage of property technology.
The first phase of digitisation largely answered an important question:
Where should we record this?
The next phase needs to answer a different one:
Why does a Property Manager still need to make this happen?
That doesn’t mean removing people from property management. Quite the opposite.
Property management is fundamentally a relationship business. There will always be situations requiring judgement, empathy, negotiation and experience.
Those are precisely the things experienced Property Managers should have more time to do.
Technology should be dealing with more of the predictable work surrounding them.
If a contractor hasn’t responded within an agreed period, should a Property Manager really need to remember to chase them?
If a landlord hasn’t approved a quote, should somebody have to notice manually?
And when somebody opens a maintenance case, should they have to reconstruct its history from several different conversations before understanding what is happening?
Technology should increasingly be capable not simply of storing those interactions, but of recognising what needs to happen next and helping move the process forward.
Let Property Managers manage the exceptions
Routine actions are predictable: follow up when there has been no response, request approval, send an update, escalate a missed deadline and maintain a complete timeline.
The difficult cases are different.
An unhappy tenant. A disputed repair. A vulnerable resident. A landlord reluctant to authorise essential work. A situation where regulation, cost and customer expectations collide.
Those are the moments when an experienced Property Manager adds enormous value.
The objective of technology shouldn’t therefore be to remove the Property Manager.
It should be to remove enough of the routine coordination surrounding them that they can spend more time actually being one.
A different measure of good technology
Perhaps we also need to change how we judge property management software.
The number of features in a platform is easy to measure. The amount of information it can store is easy to demonstrate.
But there may be a more useful question:
How much work does it actually remove?
Does it reduce the number of things somebody needs to remember? Does it reduce unnecessary chasing? Does it make the current position immediately visible? Does it identify when something has stalled?
And does it give Property Managers more time for the situations where human judgement genuinely matters?
Property management has already made enormous progress in moving from paper to digital systems.
The next opportunity is to move from recording work to orchestrating it.
Because a digital process isn’t necessarily an efficient process.
And if the Property Manager still has to chase, check, remember and reconnect every step, perhaps we haven’t automated property management as much as we think.
We’ve simply digitised the chasing.
Stephen Marr is Co-Founder and Commercial Director of Nestsen, a property technology company working with letting agents on maintenance and property management operations.
