Company Name
Presidio Property Management
Door Count
200+
Portfolio Type
Multifamily Single-family
Buildium Customer Since
2018
Company Name
Presidio Property Management
Door Count
200+
Portfolio Type
Multifamily Single-family
Buildium Customer Since
2018
Leuri Zibetti is always looking for ways to make her property management company, Presidio Property Management in Pleasant Grove, UT, leaner and more efficient. Presidio has served the greater Provo community for 15 years, specializing in single-family and small multi-family properties. To help her company take their owner and tenant relationships to the next level, and save her team time, she turned to Buildium from the beginning.
Before she started her own business, Zibetti worked for another property management company in their accounting department. That company joined Buildium eight years before Zibetti left, so she was already familiar with Buildium’s property management platform.
Still, when it came time to hang out her own tile, Zibetti wanted to shop around to check out other property management software solutions.
“I even flew out to Las Vegas to talk to somebody that was using Buildium,” she recalls. In the end, she decided to join Buildium for her own business.
“I’d been using it and did a lot of research and just decided that Buildium was the most user-friendly one that I saw out there,” she says. “It hit all the buttons of the features that I wanted to be able to use that were more customizable to my portfolio.”
That included maintenance, leasing, and renewals. In this case study, Zibetti explains how Buildium cut down the manual processes her team has to perform, which gave her time to focus on her clients, tenants, and her own business.
Zibetti and her team have been working to improve their maintenance process, including following up more frequently and taking better notes on tasks. This has been particularly important as tenants become less likely to call and complain about unsolved issues and turn to Google Reviews instead.
“If a request falls through the cracks, they won’t say, ‘Hey, by the way, we’re still here. This hasn’t been done.’ They’ll just go give you a bad review,” she says. “So part of what I can do with Buildium is that I can check those tasks and I can update even if there’s nothing new to say.”
Before discovering Buildium’s renewals feature at her previous company, Zibetti was handling lease renewals manually.
“Frankly, I didn’t discover renewals until like a year before I left the other company I’d been working with Buildium for eight years or more. And then I discovered renewals and that was a game changer for me.”
“Before that, I was running reports,” says Zibetti. “Every month I’d have to run a report to see [which leases were expiring] and then I would have to manually create an email that said, ‘Okay, this is what we’re going to do. This is the offer.’ And so it was just a lot more labor intensive.”
If she overlooked an expiring lease, she would have to extend the current lease a few extra months, something owners were not happy about, particularly if they were in the process of raising rents.
This was particularly frustrating when she came across an incorrect expiration date that someone had entered into the system.
“I would catch all of these renewals where somebody input the wrong date and I didn’t see it. So now it’s five days before their lease is going to expire, recalls Zibetti. “Now I have to go through and give them a temporary renewal because I can’t expect them to move out in five days and they didn’t know they were going to be moving in five days.”
In Utah, property managers can only charge an application fee for the tenant they approve. They aren’t allowed to take multiple fees and for a single listing.
“There’s been a lot of legislation coming out and a lot of lawsuits and a lot of pain points around application fees, because there were some owners that would make more money taking application fees than actually renting out the properties, so the state came in and made some rules about that,” Zibetti explains.
While the new legislation is meant to protect applicants, it does create complications for property managers, who now have to keep track of the fees they take in, and then return the money for prospects they reject, or retroactively charge one fee for the applicant they approve.
Zibetti says her team is getting better at following up on maintenance requests and taking accurate notes on each ticket because of Buildium’s maintenance tools.
If a tenant calls or texts a complaint, Zibetti and her team encourage them to submit it through the Resident Center. From there, the tenant can see when Zibetti’s team follows up as well as when they can expect a resolution.
“I can go in once a week or every couple of weeks and say, ‘Just wanted to let you know we’re still waiting on those parts.’ So it not only updates the notes for the task, but I can also copy that to a tenant. And the tenant can be updated,” Zibetti explains. “And so Buildium helps us kind of keep tenants happier through a difficult process.”
Buildium is also helping Zibetti and her team keep up with lease renewals.
“It allows me to just generate a renewal offer and I can do [an email] template that says, ‘This is your renewal for this time period. You have until such-and-such a date to let us know if you’re going to renew or not.” And so it was again, it was just much more efficient doing that.
Taking application fees and refunding them later was a lot of work Zibetti wasn’t willing to do. Buildium allows Zibetti to do a manual charge for a single application and process applications one at a time.
Many of the software solutions Zibetti considered before signing on to Buildium didn’t have that feature.
“They had no option for you to take the application fee information but not charge that, and then push a button later to charge it,” she explains. “It became a deal breaker for me for many of the other software I was looking at.”
Zibetti estimates that the efficiencies Buildium offers through their tools have saved her and her team 20 hours a week. That’s time she can translate into growing her business.
“Some of the efficiency features in Buildium helped me to save time, which means that I can go out and get more business,” she says. “So if I’m saving 20 hours . . . That’s 20 hours I can be at industry events networking with people. I can be here networking with people. I can be calling people on the phone. I can return phone calls. Because if I’m too busy putting in checks, I can’t even return owner phone calls or prospective owner phone calls until my month end is done. This way I can have my employees out showing units.”
To learn more, check out Buildium’s free 14-day trial or request a demo.
