Think Again Before Putting Confidential Data in the Cloud

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The ‘Cloud’ – it is everywhere – literally. That is what the cloud is … a place to house data spread out over an untold number of computers and servers throughout the world.  About 70% of all Americans use the cloud to some degree. With the multitude of mobile devices, it works wonders. You can access your music and videos everywhere, you can update your calendar in sync with other devices, and you can store your sensitive data there. Wait, maybe not the last one. Here are some serious considerations before you put your confidential data in the cloud.

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Our government wouldn’t pry into my data, would it?  Heard of the NSA? By now, probably all Americans have, and not all of it is good. In fact, some of the news is downright unsettling. Now, with the Patriot Act and the NSA’s interpretation of it, your data on the Internet is less safe. The federal government can now get to your data or your client’s data simply by issuing a subpoena, no court order is needed. On top of that, there is plenty of evidence that government agencies are not even bothering with a subpoena in some cases, as the NSA has admitted that some of its employees have gathered information on their own account.  So if you manage data for your clients, and the NSA has suspicions regarding one of them, your data could be shared with others – client names, Ids, social security numbers, financial transactions, and more.

 

Backing up Property Manager dataMy data is backed up in the cloud, right?  Sure, there are redundant backups of your data. That means more servers with your information and more avenues for compromising it.  Has your computer ever gone down? Well, so do servers. And when that happens, your data is inaccessible. Maybe there is a hacker attack and the server is shut down for safety reasons, or maybe the electrical grid is compromised, or a natural disaster happens, the list is endless. If you are running your application on the cloud, your business is dead in the water, and your clients have no access to their data. You can’t process any payments, pay bills, or market your business because everything your business does is done online. Maybe someday you can get the data back, but it could be days or weeks to re-enter lost information. Imaging that if your data is lost and there are hundreds or millions of other clients hosted on the same server, how long would it take to get to you?

 

What happens when they post the ‘Out of Business’ sign?  In the real world, when you do business with a company and they fold, you pick up and find another company. But, what if your entire business is dependent on that company and all of your data is held by that company? What if your log in just stops working and your calls are not returned? You clients will certainly be calling you and demanding answers. You may never recover your data or your client’s data. Your valuable information is suddenly gone, and you will have to start from scratch.

 

My monthlMonthly payments for real estate companiesy payments are reasonable, is the cloud a good deal?  Certainly it is for the vendors. According to the research firm IDC, 2012 revenues are estimated to be 42 billion dollars and estimates for 2013 are as high as 131 billion, according to Gartner, a leading information technology research and advisory company. Consumers are used to monthly payments drafted from their bank account, but often don’t realize the eventual cost. For example, property managers that use ‘software as a service’ (SAAS) typically pay an amount per managed property, and a dollar per property is common. So, if you manage 20 rental units, you’ll pay $20.00 month. But that cost is unending, and can go up at the vendors’ discretion. You pay the increase, or else they can switch you off, effectively shutting down your business. Let’s say you pick up management on a 200 unit apartment building.  Your monthly cost skyrockets to $220.00 per month, or $2640.00 per year just to use their software.

Hackers magnifying glass

Can hackers access my data and my customer data?  Computer hacking is at an epidemic level and they are extremely sophisticated. Hackers can attack major web servers to garner information and filter out all of the email address, bank account numbers, and social security numbers. It doesn’t matter is they know the customer name; they have what they need to steal the identities of your customers.  Once your user name and password is obtained, the rest of your data is there for the taking.  It doesn’t have to be a genius hacker in a dark basement in a foreign country. They can be sitting at a table in the same restaurant or coffee shop while you work on a public Wi-Fi network, stealing from your cloud-based transactions if your application does not use secure HTTPS data transfer.

 

Data outage for property management companyWhat other factors could affect my data?  There are other ways to compromise your data. One way is a malicious ‘denial of service’ where automated systems flood a server to the point that it has to shut down, leaving the customers stranded. In 2011, about 15% of all small businesses were affected by such an interruption, and a whopping 30% of all large businesses were affected. Often those attacks are not reported or even noticed if they are quickly addressed, but other attacks have caused complete outages. Another way that your data could be affected is by natural disasters at the server site, cyber attacks, and electrical grid attacks. While a customer might understand if your business was affected by a fire or hurricane, they might not understand that a server in France could affect their valuable information. If your business was affected, you could take your backups to another computer system, but your cloud data is beyond your control.

 

Does youTwitter bird realtor down timer provider promise they are online 99.5 percent of the time?  That looks great, who can complain about just a .05 percent downtime? Lots of businesses can, and in fact this is only a promise usually not supported by a ‘guarantee’ that compensates you if it doesn’t work out.  Doing the math you’ll find that the ‘expected’ downtime is 44 hours per year, or 3.6 hours per week that your business can’t operate if it depends on the cloud to run.  However, you will still need to pay all of your employees for that time.

 

Are we trying to discourage people from using the cloud? No, having access to shared data is fantastic for many applications, especially for sharing videos, pictures, books, text messages, email, non-confidential documents, and a host of apps. Just think twice about committing your business to the cloud, be aware of the pitfalls, and ask the right questions of potential cloud based vendors. Your information and the records of your customers are too valuable to put at risk. Here are some suggestions of what you might ask of your cloud-based vendor if you are considering moving your business to the cloud.

15 Things to ask your cloud computer vendor:

1. Do you have a disaster recovery plan? Tell me about it.

2. Will I be notified of any down time, either planned or unplanned?This to ask cloud computer vendor

3. Will you provide me with my own copy of my data in usable form?

4. Do you sub-contract out my data to a different company or hosting service?

5. Do you use a secure gateway for transfer of data?

6. Is my valuable data encrypted? To what level of security?

7. What compensation would I receive if my data is lost?

8. What level of employee in your company has access to my data?

9. Does your company provide encryption of email addresses to eliminate spam?

10. Is my data kept separated from other companies?

11. If I miss a payment, will my business be cut off?

12. Is my data redundancy stored over multiple geographic locations?

13. What percentage of ‘up-time’ can you guarantee?

14. Is the data that you maintain subject to government inspection?

15. If I switch to another company will I be able to get exported files?

Incentives to Maintain Happy Tenants

TenantsWorking-20Besides covering the basic lease conditions and provisions, you can also turn your lease into a valuable marketing tool for your business while at the same time providing extra satisfaction for your tenants. You can develop tenant loyalty that will result in longer relationships, on-time payments, better care for your property, assistance with marketing, and possibly an eventual sale to your tenant.

Award special benefits to your tenants the longer they stay.

At each tenant lease anniversary, provide a financial or other type of award, provided they are on time with all of their rent payments. This will encourage them to stay with you longer. For example, you can write into your lease that after the first year, upon renewal of the lease, they will receive a special gift, such as a free carpet cleaning or an interior paint job. While this enhances your property, it will improve tenant satisfaction as well.  On the second year, you could offer to plant some new trees or to improve the landscaping in some way. You tenants will know that you care about the property, and this may encourage them to take better care of your property as well. Every year, reward your tenant with something new, and you will develop a long lasting good relationship with your renter.

Provide incentives for your tenants to recommend you to other prospective tenants.

Many landlords do not use the free marketing tools right at their disposal. If you have a satisfied tenant, that tenant can become a valuable asset for your marketing plans. Add a clause to your lease that provides a bonus to your tenant if he or she recommends someone that signs a lease on another rental property. The incentive could be in the form of an added appliance, Internet or networking upgrade, ceiling fan, interior painting, or whatever you feel is worth the savings in marketing costs. Be sure to talk to your renters each time they pay rent and find out what their needs are. By providing the right incentives, eventually you will have a team of renters helping you to rent your property.

Provide an incentive for your tenants to eventually own the house they currently rent, provided they remain in good standing as a tenant.

Provide a small ‘credit’ towards the home purchase each time rent is paid on time. This set amount will be logged into your Tenants’ account (on paper only) and will be used as a lump sum credit only if the Tenant buys the house later.  You should write into the lease that the credit can only be used after a set number of years. This will help retain the Tenant, and also provide an incentive for the Tenants to use the accrued credit after the time period has been reached. You can also stipulate that if the rent is ever late, then the accrued ‘credit’ will revert to zero, and will begin to accumulate on the next on-time payment.

Encourage your tenants to make upgrades to your property if they have the skills.Tools for Tenant incentives

Be sure to write in your lease that repair and improvement requests are in writing. At the time of the lease signing, ask if the tenant has any professional skills, such a painting, plumbing, landscaping. (You do want a use a professional to insure that the job is done properly and that the worked is insured). If that is the case, you can trade for repairs or improvements. Commonly, you will be able to reduce the rent for improvements or provide other incentives, such as mentioned above. Other jobs such as yard work, posting flyers, minor painting, or installing hanging plants can be done for home purchase credits (see above) or by you providing the materials for the job. Most tenants will be willing to do some work to improve the appearance of their rental if you will provide the raw materials.

By including these items in your lease agreement, the tenant will understand that you care about their rental property and these suggestions can provide opportunities for both you and your tenants to save money. Build these incentives into your residential lease agreement to set the tone for a long profitable relationship with your tenant.

New directions in SEO for Property Mgmt Websites

We’d like to provide some more insight into your SEO needs for your website. At the Tenant File Property Management Software, we realize how busy you are collecting rent, maintaining your rentals, and providing information for your owners. However, you just cannot ignore the importance of keeping your website visible through SEO. But SEO has changed, and you need to be aware of that.

In the ‘old days’ , a large part of SEO meant optimizing your website through keywords place on your site, paying someone to create links to the site, and submitting articles to directories or article sites with links to your home page. If you are still focusing on those techniques, you are probably hurting your Google rankings. Through the Panda and later Penguin algorithm changes, Google has increasingly focused on ‘quality’ and how you are providing a service to the visitors to your site. So ‘selling’ a service has taken a back seat to ‘providing’ a service, and the difference is not as subtle as you may think.  Here are some examples:

  • Google does really care much anymore about the number of links you have coming to your site. It cares about the ‘quality’ of those links. Are you involved in your community? If so, get links from local newspaper websites. Do you have links on real estate sites such as industry associations or property management groups? And don’t direct all of those links to your home page. You need to have other webpages (or landing pages)  focused on the topic that is pointing to it from other pages.
  • In the past you could write an article about your business, fill it with your keywords and publish it to article sites. Now, you must provide content that is good enough for others to want to share it. So your content must not be full of keywords, but should look ‘natural’ and be of value to the reader. They should want to share it via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, and other social sites. Google is looking at the number of shares as a part of their evaluation of your importance, or authority, as they call it.

If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. If some is searching for your services, the experts at Google and Bing want to rank those sites that are providing real answers in their field of expertise, not just a company that has hired an SEO company to write content that is just a bunch of words with keywords added. That approach will only serve to make the Internet a more robust provider of real value, and not just reward the business with the more money for SEO. You know your business better than anyone, so take more of a personal involvement in the content you create, interact with industry groups, and write about your involvement in your local community.

 

 

Using the Tenant File Recurring Fields

The ‘Recurring Fields’ in the Tenant File are fields that you can use to post a variety of items. They can be either income or expenses, a flat fee or a percentage of rent, or even both. You can post them using any account in the program.

RecurringFields

To start, you need to choose the ‘name’ of the field label. To do that, go to Preferences > Recurring/Escrow Field Labels. Type in the name you want to use. Then go back to the ‘Units’ button and you’ll see the changes.

Next, enter the amount that you want to post. If if is a percentage of rent, add a ‘%’ sign after the number, such as ‘10%’. Do not enter a dollar sign or anything but a number, decimal, or percentage sign. Do this for all units that are going to use this particular recurring field.

To post, just go to Posting > Automatic Posting, and choose the recurring field you want to post. Then choose the account you want to use, enter the date for the transaction,  and hit Begin Posting.

On the next screen you will be able to post each recurring field item one by one, or you can click on Post All to zip through all of the recurring field items you have set up.

It’s that easy!

 

 

Special Rent Posting

Most rents are due on the first of the month. The Tenant File can easily handle those rents, and even rents that are due on other days throughout the month. For example, if you go to the ‘Post Rent‘  button and choose  ‘I want to charge rents to my tenants’ you can choose which due dates (or due date ranges) to post. If you select the check box at the bottom of the page, the program will do all of this for you automatically, without your intervention.  (We suggest that if your due dates are all on the first of the month that you do it manually – it only takes about 5 seconds!)

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However, some of our customers have to charge rent on a weekly, bi-weekly, or other interval. This is where the ‘Special Rent Charges’ comes in to play.  Found under the menu selection ‘Posting > Special Rent Charges’, this screen allows for flexible rent posting in addition to the regular rent posting. It is pretty simple – you just enter the following:

  • Start and End Date: this is when you want the program to start charging rent, and when you want it to end. You should put the tenant’s ending lease date as the End Date.
  • Last Posted: This is to show you when the program posted rent last.
  • Repeat: This is the important field, which is the ‘interval’ of the repeating rent. For example, if you are charging weekly rent, just enter the number ‘7’ and the program will charge rent every 7 days.
  • Active: Lastly, you must ‘activate’ the posting by entering a ‘Y’, or put a ‘N’ to deactivate.

So, if you are renting on a short term basis, the Tenant File can work for you. The Special Rent Posting is easy to set up and will take the hassle of having to manually charge rents to your Tenants.

Tips On Using the Built-in Scheduler

Often in a large program there are areas that don’t get used to their full potential, and the Tenant File scheduler is one of those. It was originally created with scheduling vacation homes as the prime purpose, but it is certainly versatile enough for many other uses.Tenant File Scheduler

First, the scheduler is available for every rental unit in the entire program. You simple pick the rental address to schedule something and continue on from there. Since the scheduler is connected to the Reminder System in the Tenant File, you can enter an ‘Action Date’. That way, your entry will pop up in the Reminder System for the ‘To Do’ reminders if you have turned that on.

The memo box is for a detailed description of the current entry. For example, if you are renting a vacation home, then you can use this for specific details about the renter, such as any special terms and conditions. There is quite a bit of space there, more that the size of the entry box.

To select a range of dates, you can type in the dates on the left or drag your mouse to choose them on the calendar.  Click the ‘Insert Date Range’ button after you make any changes to the calendar. Additionally, there are ‘extra fields’ that can be used for anything. For example if you have blocked out a week for a vendor to remodel a rental home, you can use these fields for the vendor contact information.

After entering the new information, choose the ‘Create a NEW Entry’ button and everything will be saved. Uses for the scheduler would be short term rentals, vendor jobs, tenant vacation dates, office appointments, or pretty much whatever you want to use it for.

You can get to the scheduler from any rental unit screen, or you can get to it from the Tenant File Main Menu under Miscellaneous > Scheduler.  We hope these tips have helped you get more familiar with the Tenant File Scheduler and that you can use it to help save more of your valuable time.

 

Tips for Transaction Posting

Sometimes there are little things that make work a little easier, and we try to add them to the Tenant File. We are surprised that many users don’t know these shortcuts, even though they can be found in the Tenant File User’s Guide. (That’s ok, many of us skip that part, too, when we download other software).

So, when entering transactions into the ledger, here are some tips.

  • Click into date field, and before you start typing anything, press your ‘space bar’. That will enter today’s date for you, and move to the next column.
  • If you start entering a date, be sure to enter the ‘numbers’ only, using 2 digits for the month and day, and 4 for the year. The slashes are entered for you.
  • In the next column, the ‘Account’ field, you can simply start typing and account. The drop down box will open and you can press the ‘tab’ key to select the account and move to the next column.
  • The ‘Remark’ field has 60 characters available, so that you have plenty of space to describe the transaction. Be aware though, all reports may not have enough space to show the entire length of the remark.
  • Be sure to only enter numbers in the ‘Amount’ field. The dollar sign will automatically be entered for you.
  • The amount sign (either a debit or credit) is determined by the ‘Account’ you choose. For example of you choose ‘Rent Charged’ it will only be an expense (to the Tenant).
  • The ‘Ck/Dep’ field only accepts ‘numbers’. If you have a long money order number, use the ‘Remark’ field.
  • The ‘Post To’ column is for display only, and is also tied to the ‘Account’ you select. It you see ‘Tenant’ that means the transaction can only be posted to the Tenant Ledger, and if you see ‘Both (T/U’) that means the transaction will be posted to ‘Both’ the Tenant Ledger (tenant accounting) and the Unit Ledger (owner account for that rental unit).

Be sure to remember that you need to click on a different row (above or below) to SAVE your transaction. To DELETE a transaction, click on the ‘grey button’ on the far left to highlight the entire row, then press the ‘Del’ key on your KEYBOARD. (not on the screen!).

Hope that helps, more tips coming soon!

Domain Names for Property Managers

Tenant File Property Management Software LogoIt is getting more and more important to have a great domain name. Not only does Google take keyword matches into account, but the general public will often judge your business based on your domain.

On the first statement, Google has valued exact match keywords for a long time. They are not ‘quite’ as important to Google as before, because domain name traders started selling ‘long tail’ keywords such as ‘bestpropertymanagementcompany.com’ and something had to be done. But just look at the search results, and you’ll see lots of exact match domains at the top of the rankings.

The public perception is important, too. If you domain name is ‘AustinTX-Homes-And-More.com’, it could look like you are not that professional, regardless of whether you are or not. Now ‘AustinHomes.com’ would be good. Those domains are taken, so you might have to get creative. Don’t choose a name with hyphens or anything too long. Consider other extensions besides ‘.com’, so those are more available.

We own over 200 domain names, mostly relating to our business. A few we picked up because we liked them, although they don’t tie directly to our industry. If you are interesting in purchasing some of the following domains, just let us know. We won’t charge an arm and a leg, and some are really good.

  • Rent Homes .us – for any company renting homes in the US.
  • i Tenant Manager .com Internet Property Management business   
  • i Rental Manager .comInternet Property Management business
  • i Property Managers .comInternet Property Management business
  • i Manage Tenants .com Internet Property Management business
  • Commercial Management .info – info on commercial building mgmt.
  • Rental Management .info info on managing residential buildings

Please visit our website to contact us at http://www.TenantFile.com

Thanks!

 

 

 

Update on SEO experiences

I have previously written some remarks regarding the problems the companies can experience with SEO companies. Here are a few more comments that hopefully will be of use to other companies. If you are like us, our administration gets probably about 10 or more solicitations from SEO companies daily, and most of them are from India or other foreign countries. I have no problem with India, in fact, we do side job work with some programmers in India sometimes, and have had a great experience. However, the majority of SEO companies that offer ‘Rank on Page One of Google!” or ‘150 Directory Submissions Per Month!” are wasting your time.

Tenant File Logo

Visit the Tenant File website

The old days of blasting out articles or directory links are long gone, and can actually hurt your rankings now. For directories, you should pick under 20 that focus on your specific industry along with a handful of nationally recognized company directories. I’m not going to give specific ones other than Yahoo and Open Source Directory, but you can find them with a quick Google search.  Articles are most helpful if they are distributed ‘organically’, meaning that they are interesting enough that others want to share them or post them on their own blogs or websites. The more helpful information that you can provide, the more Google considers you and ‘authority’, and the higher you’ll rank.

After making mistakes and learning the hard way, I think we have hit our stride in SEO and marketing. We are corresponding with social media outlets, sending press releases for newsworthy items, providing information via Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and updating our websites with fresh content. The fresh content will show Google that it needs to keep indexing your site (sending robots to visit your site) so that you are visible to Google more often.

Google is now smart enough to see when they are being ‘played’ and the old techniques don’t work any more. It is important that you don’t just send one or two thousand dollars to an SEO company and sit back waiting for a page one rank in Google. You have to follow up on those links closely if someone else is doing them for you. You might be surprised to find that your links are going to worthless link farms that are actually doing you harm.  And those articles that are being written for you? They are probably writing one article based on other articles, then re-wording (or ‘spinning’) the same article to make it ‘look’ fresh to Google. I know it is time consuming to do it yourself, but maybe you should seriously consider hiring someone dedicated to your company that you can trust to look out for your best interests. Good luck!

Interesting property management articles and tips