The Problem
As a property management leader, your goal is to empower your team to share information – and to give them the right tools to do that, from corporate email addresses, to company phones, to video conferencing licenses, to a company knowledge base. But the dirty secret of property management communication is that much of the day-to-day work and information sharing is done via text messaging on employees’ personal phones.
Why have property management teams resorted to texting, instead of using more secure, searchable methods?
- Email overload has become such a problem for most organizations that team members believe texting is the only way to get a response, fast. Otherwise, the email will be buried in someone’s inbox for days.
- At the site-level, property management staff may share an email address or not have email on their phone. Text is the only reliable system they have for communication with other team members.
Texting has become a default method of communication for property management teams, but storing information and communicating via text on personal phones is a huge liability for your company, for 3 main reasons:
Sensitive resident, financial, and property information can end up in insecure places
Texting about getting lunch with a coworker is fine, but what about sharing photos of an emergency condition at a property? What about sharing financial information about residents related to their leases or rent? Property management communication can be sensitive, and it shouldn’t be on personal devices.
Not only do you want visibility into back-and-forth conversations about property conditions, resident issues, etc. in case they escalate – but you also want to be able to find that information later, sometimes even years later. And you certainly don’t want it ending up in the wrong hands.
Information stored in text messages means employee turnover hits your organization even harder
When an employee leaves your team, if critical conversations, photos, and files are on their personal phone buried in text message conversations, it’s nearly impossible to get that information back. Forget about referring to it later. And when you need to train a new team member? You need to start from scratch.
Text messaging is inherently disorganized, resulting in lots of wasted time
Texting wasn’t built for organizing conversations, files, and photos, and searching them later. Additionally, if some conversations are kept in email, some in text, and some in WhatsApp, you end up with a decentralized mess of information where team members are spending hours trying to find information or photos later – time they could be spending doing other things to keep properties running efficiently.
Texting is a great tool for group chatting with friends and family – not so much for running a portfolio of properties. Property management teams are turning to real-time messaging platforms that:
- Are secure, and keep important information in a centralized hub
- Are as easy-to-use as texting, especially for on-the-go on-site team members
- Have organization by property and unit built in, so information can always be found later
We created Synco to give teams a way to communicate that is just as easy as text, but far more secure, powerful, and organized. Meet Synco.
