App of the month: Re-Leased
Each month at Withers Tsang we take a look at one of the many applications or digital programs that are designed to help your business thrive.
This month it’s Re-Leased
Re-Leased is a cloud-based commercial property management software for property managers, landlords or accountants. It helps you manage all of your properties, leases and tenants in one central location, so your data can be accessed on any device – anywhere, anytime. Re-Leased aims to increase efficiency and reduce administration time by over 75%.
Some key features:
Dashboard
From the dashboard, you can view your personal calendar or global calendar. You can access as a range of analytics and charts in the ‘My Analytics’ tab – including budgets vs actuals, current year to date expenses, occupancy rates, and your top earning property or tenancy. You can also access hubs for dealing with maintenance, rent arrears, and inspection tasks.
Calendar View
Re-Leased automatically integrates with Office 365 and your Google calendar, but the dashboard calendar requires a bit of initial set-up. For example, you can set a reminder to notify you 6 months in advance if a lease is expiring.
The personal calendar view will display your tasks and events for properties where you are the manager. You can delegate tasks to other users (and they to you), including inspections, maintenance, reminders, and insurance renewals. These will show up on your calendar. Maintenance and inspection tasks can be linked to both the property and the tenancy it’s related to.
You also have the option to view the global calendar (picture on the right), where you can filter whose calendar you want to see.
Overdue tasks will display in the to-do list on the right-hand side of the calendar (as shown above), until you manually turn them off. Reminders are personal to the user they’re assigned to, so can’t be viewed by other users and won’t show up on the global calendar.
Events can relate to details in a property file (such as budget ends, insurance renewals, or property keys), or to details in a tenancy file (such as term renewals, rent reviews, term ends, and final rents). Close of period tasks relate to client accounting – you can control who sees these reminders in the settings for your client account.
Properties Tab
The property tab makes it easier for you to monitor and keep track of what’s happening with each of your properties. It includes a map feature, displaying the location of your properties on a map. You can view the details of each property through the side tabs.
Re-leased allows for multi-tenanted property tracking, which means you can manage what spaces in the building are occupied and by whom. You can then set up separate leases within a building and allocate rent to each area.
Maintenance hub
The maintenance hub displays maintenance requests for all your properties in one place, allowing you to manage your maintenance more easily. You can use the hub to create recurring maintenance requests, send emails to contractors, and request quotes. Once quotes have come through you have the option to accept them and create your work order.
Arrears hub
This allows you to view all tenants who currently have arrears, as well as the details of those arrears. You can set up company-wide rules, such as sending reminders at custom intervals to tenants who are in arrears. However, reminders won’t be sent without your approval. Sending out automatic communication can be risky and confusing for your stakeholders.
Re-Leased Mobile Apps
Re-Leased offers three apps so you can access information from your mobile.
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Property Manager App
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Tenant App
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Landlord App
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NB: The app has limited visible information about a property and fewer features compared to the desktop version.
Accounting
Re-leased can make your accounting simpler. After the initial set-up, it will automatically generate invoices for tenants, as well as rent and outgoings either in advance or on the due date. You can also set up a chart of accounts codes for your invoices. Every time you receive an invoice for outgoings/expenses, you can allocate it to one of your account codes and charge the payment directly to your tenants.
All income and expenses are recorded in Re-leased, so you can perform rent reviews on the platform that will automatically sync with your accounting software. Like Xero, Re-Leased offers bank statement reconciliations, and gives you the ability to set up a budget for each of your individual properties. You can also generate all kinds of reports to get a clear, concise view of your financials.
Integrations
Re-Leased offers seamless integration with a wide range of applications:
Xero integration:
Re-Leased offers seamless two-way Xero integration, so you can instantly synchronise your financial accounts and save admin time. This constant flow of information between systems ensures your data is up-to-date and accurate, and allows real-time reporting. Tenant data in financial accounts is also instantly synced. Each Re-Leased company can be connected directly to the corresponding Xero company.
When you create an invoice in Xero, it’s also sent to Re-Leased - and vice versa. This removes the need to create two invoices, eliminating double handling and minimising the risk of double entry. Tenant invoices are also automatically raised in line with leases, allowing you to enable automatic transaction matching and reconciliation.
Some alternatives to Re-Leased
myRent:
myRent doesn’t directly compare with Re-Leased, but is a good, cheaper alternative if you’re a self-managing NZ landlord. It allows you to advertise your properties on some of the top real estate listing websites (such as realestate.co.nz and OneRoof) for a total of $40+GST, or perform tenant checks ranging from $35 to $55. You can also use it to manage your properties, with vital features such as rent collection (connecting your bank account for automated reconciliation), renewal and inspection reminders, generating tenancy agreements and bond lodgements, tracking and organising maintenance, tracking expenses, and generating invoices for your bills. myRent offers a 2-month free trial and then ranges from $10-$50 a month, depending on the size of your portfolio.
mri Real Estate Software:
mri Real Estate is built for property management and real estate companies managing residential properties on behalf of owners, and provides very similar features to Re-Leased. It offers two main platforms: mri living (which simplifies the work of property managers, agencies and residents through integrated digital services), and mri@work (which helps you develop your commercial property portfolio in a competitive environment). Mri offers training sessions for staff, regular webinars, and features including credit checks, real-time reporting, and budgeting/forecasting. It’s also cheaper than Re-leased, at $1.75 per property per month with a minimum subscription of $150 per month. However, it doesn’t integrate with Xero, and many may find Re-Leased simpler to use.
PropertyMe:
PropertyMe is similar to Re-Leased, and includes a Dashboard view showing you an overview of your portfolio (comparable to Re-Leased’s My Analytics tab). It also displays some key insights and customisable KPIs, and allows for document storage using ‘drag and drop’, where documents can be stored against a property, owner, tenant, task or job. PropertyMe also includes standard management features such as bill management, tenancy and arrears management, inspection scheduling and management. It integrates with Xero and your data is automatically synced to the matched Xero accounts. There are two plans to choose from: Core (starting at $110 a month for up to 100 properties) and Pro ($275 per month for up to 100 properties). There is also a one-time onboarding cost of $495 on top of the monthly fee.
Concluding thoughts
Setting up your business with any new software can feel daunting. It’s not always simple, and getting used to something new can take time. However, we believe the value provided by Re-leased is well worth the initial set-up and training.
To help you in the transition from your existing system, Re-Leased offers onboarding support for your data conversion and provides an implementation specialist who will manage your onboarding, set up training for your team, outline what you need to get started, and stay with you until you’re feeling confident. There’s also a knowledge hub available to you at any time, which includes how-to guides, videos, reports and checklists.
Re-Leased allows you to have as many users as you need, with pricing based on the size of your portfolio, not the number of users. Pricing for 0-25 tenancies is roughly $749 a month.
To find out more about the full functionality of Re-leased, or to see if it’s right for you, we recommend you request a demo or quote: re-leased.com/en-nz/pricing
