PM Process Workshop: Delinquencies & Evictions with Aimee Berkompas

We're live. Amy, welcome. I'm actually so excited to have you co-hosting with me because you're always kind of in the background on these and I'm always feeling like you would have good inputs on a lot of the things that we talk about. So, welcome.

Yeah, it's fun to be here. Yeah. On camera and not just behind it.

Yeah, absolutely. We'll give a minute or two for folks to stroll on in virtually to the live show today. We're going to be talking about your delinquency and eviction process. It's a fun topic. So while we let folks corral into through the waiting room and into the show, I want to hear a one-sentence summary of your worst move-out finding, like tenant moves out, is evicted or whatever. You show up to the property. Give me one sentence of your horror story, worst situation that you found, because we were just talking about this. I have a very upset owner that I'm dealing with right now. We had tenants move in and then move out one year later, and the tenants literally did $20,000 worth of damage to the property. The owner is irate, of course, and wants us to pay for it. And it just reminded me of some of the worst stories and worst situations that we've dealt with as property managers. So hit me with your worst. Give me one sentence or a couple of bullet points on what you've, what you've discovered upon opening the front door of a vacated property. While we let those fun stories roll in, Amy, welcome again. Why don't— can you just take like 2 minutes and give us a little bit of your background? And for those who may not have seen or heard from you before.

Sure. Yep. So I'm Amy Burkampas. I am a client solutions architect at LeadSimple. So I've been at LeadSimple for coming up on 6 years now, actually. So yeah, in my time at LeadSimple, I've definitely— I've worked with a lot of our clients building out processes, helping you all set up CRM, your sales process, improving that. I've built out a lot of the playbooks that we recommend to our property management clients, um, based on all of those interactions with you guys. And then I've also built out and been involved in a lot of our internal processes too. So processes I enjoy, and I, uh, really enjoy just looking at small business problems and figuring out the best solutions as everybody's growing and scaling.

Yeah. Amy has written some of the best, well, most of, but also some of the best help articles across the LeadSimple knowledge space. Uh, the help articles and support articles and guideline guidance documents. Um, you've written a lot over the years there that I've, and I've really enjoyed reading a lot of that stuff. So. Excited to have you here today, Amy. And if you're reading on the chat, seeing some of these horror stories, what we're going to be talking about today is hopefully going to reduce the chances of you having to deal with one of these by making sure that your rent collection and delinquency and eviction process is nice and tight. So this is obviously a core process for property managers is dealing with, hey, what happens when the tenant doesn't pay rent? It's one of the most common questions we get from prospective owners when we get on the phone with them. And I, this is definitely for me, one of the core company processes that it's kind of a like set it and forget it core PM process. And what we'll be talking about for the next hour is how you can get a tight process around this. We're going to be building a process live with a volunteer who's kind of waiting in the wings. And I'm going to talk through and explain my mindset and what I think about what you should include or should consider including in these, in these processes, you know, rent collection, delinquency, eviction, all kind of related in order to make sure that you're not missing something. I think early days before I knew that our processes were solid, I always had this nightmare that we would somehow like overlook a tenant that fell behind in rent and they would like slip through the system somehow. And that they would end up being there for months and months and months and we wouldn't know and the owner wouldn't notice. And then all of a sudden we discover just like, you know, $10,000 in back rent and we didn't even post a 3-day or something. So we're gonna make sure that doesn't happen. Okay, so I'm trying to think about the way in here. So I want to give my little preamble that I often do at the beginning of these live workshops, which is why, like, sort of why are we doing this, or what's the situation that's causing a need for a documented process or an automated process. So when I talk to a lot of property managers and ask them about their core processes, a lot of them will say, oh, we don't really have a process for that. And my response to that is always, well, you actually do have a process. It's just not consistent or it's not documented, but you have a way of getting it done. So if you're watching this and you may own or manage rental properties, you have a process for handling delinquent rent and 3-day notices and evictions, but it may not be consistent. It may not be documented, and you may not be able to check on the status of every individual delinquent tenant. At any given time. So what I'm hoping today is that we're going to guide you through how you can accomplish that. And where I normally advise folks to start is if you haven't already, just take some time and document your existing process. So whoever's doing this work on a monthly basis, sit with them if it's not you yourself, and just literally write out— it can be with pen and paper or, you know, Word doc or whatever. And just write out like, okay, the tenant is, you know, it's the first, everyone pays rent. Now it's the second. There's a 3-day grace period, whatever, whatever the first day is that you're going to take any action, maybe the 4th or the 5th. What's the trigger for those actions and what happens? Maybe it's posting a, you know, a late fee. Maybe it's a message about, hey, did you know rent's past due? And then what happens? What's the next step in that process? And just kind of write this all out. And that's going to be sort of like your outline for moving that documented process into a piece of software that's going to help you get it done faster, easier, easier, more accurately, less errors, more consistent, and let you look at like a dashboard so you can see the status of everything. Um, Amy, what do you think? Uh, what do you see when you talk to folks, uh, about this? Process, what are some of the common gaps, or how do you advise folks get started if they want to, if they want to build out a process here?

Yeah, I mean, there's general philosophy, process philosophy stuff, how to think through your process before diving in. Oftentimes, if you feel unclear about how the process is working, um, then just asking some clarifying questions and writing them down really, really helps with that. And then you can start building it out or improving it. You don't really know what to improve if you don't know what's happening. But then it goes back to questions like, well, what's the original goal of the process? And then how do we want to improve it? How are we measuring it? Yeah, how does it start? How does it end? What else is involved? Is it going to start another process afterwards? How quickly do we want it to be done? A lot of that type of stuff. And then what are the actual steps along the way? And then variables, it's like documents and variables on the side. It's like, here's our most common, 50% of the time it does this. And then over here we have these other things that are happening. So for delinquencies, do we have leases that maybe we inherited that have a different— it's 80% of the time that's due on the 1st, and then we have these 5 properties over here that we haven't been able to transfer over yet that are due on the 5th, what do we do with them? Yeah, kind of like, what is the context? What is it that people are having to keep in their heads to remember the nuances of the process? Get that down on paper.

Yeah.

Automating any of it.

That's a great point. The issue of like inheriting a lease, you know, you take over an occupied property and they have a lease with different settings, like different late fees, different notice, you know, that is challenging. And, um, I think that's an easy thing to overlook. So I'm glad that you mentioned that. I want to put this process in context. This is one of my favorite graphics to share. Uh, it happens to be a LeadSimple document, but I think it's generally applicable for anyone who's in property management. These are what I think of as the core property management processes. Um, so what we're going to be dealing with is over here. Um, so after, you know, the make ready and the marketing and the applications, Then you have move-in. And this little branch here is delinquencies and evictions. And that's what we're going to be focusing on. This is like the third or fourth of these live process building webinars that I've done. And we've covered some of the other processes in those. You can go back on my YouTube channel if you want to watch the replays. But this is, if you haven't seen this graphic before, it's a really great way to, to think about where is the breakpoint between processes. In other words, I see a lot of people for whom make ready, marketing, and applications is all kind of like one long process for them. It's like all together. And I won't sort of get into the details of why, but I don't think that's a best practice. I think the way it's shown here, the sort of the dividing lines between these colored boxes is the best way to think about, um, individual processes and where one process should stop and another one should start. I mean, in theory, you could have this whole thing be one big long process, right? Like, you can imagine, like, a tenant moves in and then they're in a LeadSimple process for the next 3 years until they move out. That probably wouldn't be ideal. And so there's, there's usually a, some kind of natural breaks between functions where you separate out processes.

Yep. And it's often where it's being passed off to another team or you want to be able to come back and track. All right, let's look at all the times we Did I make ready for this property?

Um, yep. All right. Um, let's see here. So once you have sort of captured your process, you have it written out, you've captured some of the nuance, you've went and talked to the folks who are actually doing the work, what's gonna be your next step? And that's sort of where we're gonna pick up, uh, with our volunteer who I'm gonna introduce in a moment. You've got a few options here. I think what a lot of people do is they have, you know, spreadsheets, right? Google Sheets, Excel, whatever the case may be. And we operated that way for many years. And that is a great step. Like if you have nothing documented and you have no way to track your processes and what's going on with your management company, I love using spreadsheets. There's nothing wrong with that, especially when you're kind of subscale. As you grow and as you add team members and as you add doors, you're going to get to the point where that feels like a messy problem and you're going to think to yourself, man, wouldn't it be cool if like this could automatically happen? Or wouldn't it be neat if like this was connected to our property management software so it could know which tenants to email when they were late with their rent? And that's usually the point at which folks start looking for a bigger solution, in the form of workflow or process software. And there's a bunch of options out there. We're going to be using LeadSimple to demo this today just because it's what I'm familiar with. And it has an integration with Buildium, which is a software that I happen to use. And, uh, our volunteer does as well, but you know, there you can— I, before LeadSimple, we were on a software called Process Street that worked awesome for us for many years. So I'm not necessarily preaching that you need to use LeadSimple for all these things. I think it's a great solution, but I'm going to keep this— I'm hoping to keep my advice and insights generic enough that you'll be able to take what you hear today and learn today and apply it to any different type of workflow or process software. So I like— I'm going to try and talk through my, my mindset as we build, uh, as we build out this process. So with that, let me go ahead and bring up our volunteer. So Clint, why don't you go ahead and come on video? Clint was gracious enough to submit a form prior to the show today, and he was the lucky winner of getting to come up and let me build out his rent collection delinquency process. Clint, welcome to the workshop today. Thanks for coming. So Clint, if you wouldn't mind, just take like 1 or 2 minutes— excuse me— and introduce yourself. Let us know where you're from, what management company you work for, about how many doors, and sort of what you guys do. And then I'll kind of ask you some more questions about your current process here before we start building.

So I've been a property manager full-time since about 2020, so started right in COVID, got to learn jumping 2 feet in the fire there. But I came on with Leonard Newland Real Estate Services. We started a property management division. It's also real estate brokerage. So I'm an adjacent arm. I got into it so I could work with investors from the start to the end of their investing journey. And we built that up to managing about 700 doors here in Eastern Central Ohio, just east of Columbus. And yeah, that's what I do full time.

That's awesome. So, Clint, you're just down the road from me, about 45 minutes east of Columbus, which is awesome. I didn't know— I didn't know that when I picked you, but we got an Ohio contingent here. So, Clint, I, you know, I mentioned earlier you're on Buildium. And you guys have some significant scale over there with 700 doors total. And I know, I think you mentioned you have just a couple hundred that are in your portfolio. So maybe share a little bit about your current delinquency process. Like, what are you, what are you doing when the tenant is late for late on their rent and what are the steps in that process?

So using BuildAM, it'll automatically apply late fees. We have our global settings. Are what our general company policies are. You know, first late fee, you know, rent's due on the 1st, that late fee is hitting on the 2nd if it's not paid. Like you alluded to before, if you inherit a tenant and they're on a different lease, then we have to go in and change those settings specifically for that lease. So that can complicate things. But in general, late on the 2nd, we give them a couple of days to come in, you know, depending on weekends and everything. But we're looking to hang a 3-day notice, an eviction notice, sometime between the 5th and the 7th. We do our owner payouts on the 10th, so that gives us enough time where that 3-day notice is expiring before we do our payouts. So that's the goal there.

Got it. Okay. And that sounds like a really typical kind of delinquent rent eviction type process. Great. So, and do you have this process like tracked anywhere in a spreadsheet or type of work, any type of workflow software or anything?

I've got the— it written out in an SOP. I give that to my virtual assistants. They help track the process. Generally, they're waiting until about the 5th of the month before they're reaching out to delinquent tenants. Buildium does start emailing tenants automatically. I think it only does emails. I don't think it does text messages, which is a drawback. So if the tenants don't have an email on the system or they have it sent to spam and they don't get those notifications. Yeah, I try to leave the automated process in place until we hang those 3-day notices just so we're not calling several hundred tenants like ask them where the rent is.

Yeah. So if an owner called and said, hey, I didn't, I didn't see the rent come in yet, what's the status of my unit? Where would you go to, to sort of find out if the 3-day had been posted yet or where they were in that process?

So we send all of our 3-day notices out at one time. So I know that I print them all out in a batch. I've got a couple of runners that start, start their driving. So I know that the 3-day notices have been pushed out. And then as soon as that gets posted, those runners are just snapping a picture with their cell phones and texting that to us. So we have record that it was posted, put on the right, right property. You know, they make sure that they get the address in that photo as well.

Yep. Clint, you're a perfect test case here. What you just described is exactly, I think, what most property managers are doing. And it's exactly what we did too. Essentially, you're, you know, your process really well. And so if you speak with an owner and they have a question, you're like, oh yeah, I know that all the 3 days went out on this day. So if you— I see here in Buildium that your rent was late on that day, so they would have gotten a 3-day. So basically you have like this built-up knowledge from your 4 to 5 years in the industry working there, and you're able to, to sort of track all that in your head. And what we're going to demonstrate by the end of today is what, what happens when there needs to be like 20 Clints, right? And like there's no way they're gonna all have this memorized. Or what if you need to onboard a new property manager every month due to turnover or you or growth of the company, the just sort of keeping it in your head thing just doesn't scale. So that's where something— and I'll share my screen and kind of show you a little bit jump to the end of what it can look like. So this is our— we call it eviction process because it doesn't actually get started until the 3 days get posted. But I haven't been involved in dealing with like resident operations in many years. And so I have no idea if an owner were to call my cell phone Well, I actually don't give out my cell phone, but if I were to get on the phone with an owner and they were to ask me what's going on with my unit, I wouldn't know. I don't even really know what day we post 3 days anymore. But what I could do is come into LeadSimple, look at our eviction process, and I can see the 3 open evictions that we have going on that are carryover from January. So these are the only 3 left from January. And I can see the stage that they're in there. They're on stage on AJE, and that stands for agreed judgment entry, which is a payment plan. So I can see who they are, what they're up to, what the status is. I can click into any one of these and I can see, um, I can see the whole history of— now that I'm thinking about, we may need to block this out on the recording because this is kind of like personal info. Um, I can see the whole history of what's gone on with this through the whole process. And so our team member Felipe has been diligently, you know, adding the notes. We can see what the unit is, what's going on with it, when they moved in, what their rent is. We can see the payment plan that's been arranged and when they're due, you know, March, April, etc. And so we have that documented for all of the evictions and we have all these stages for our eviction process. So I can go in here any time and see what's going on with our evictions. And if you were to look at this on like the 25th of the month, there would be a lot more activity going on because we'd be kind of mid-cycle. So I hope all that makes sense. And what I think I want to do now is start building yours, Clint. I want to show you if I was sitting next to you in your office in Zanesville, if I drove 35 minutes your direction, we could sit down together and this is what I would be building out for you if I was in your office. So we're going to see how far we can get with that. Clint, if you could pull up, if you haven't already, that SOP that you mentioned. Um, that you give to your VA, cuz I think that will be really helpful as we build this out.

Yeah. Let me grab that real quick.

All right, Amy, I'm gonna start building and you tell me what I'm messing up cuz I always forget like where to go for certain settings and stuff like that. All right. So we're gonna go down here to, by the way, does anyone have any questions? Uh, chat's been really quiet, but this is a pretty casual. You know, I'm not pitching anything here. I'm not selling anything. This is just like me sharing how I do things. So please feel free to jump in with questions or, you know, yeah, I guess if, if you have any questions and we'll try and address those. So I'm gonna click add a process. I'm gonna click new custom process. I'm gonna call this—

you're gonna stop sharing your screen, Peter.

Oh, I stopped sharing my screen. Yeah.

See, that's why we have you here, Amy, cuz I'll just be your backseat driver.

Yeah. It helps if I share my screen. Okay. I'm gonna move this over kind of right in front of me so I'm not looking off to the side for the whole show. I'll close out some of these tabs so I don't get distracted. All right. Delinquency for Clint. All right. So, it's already selected. That's kind of a— was that like an auto-selection based on the words up here? Amy? Okay, that's cool. Is that like a new thing here? It's like an AI reading of what I wrote. Pretty close. So anyway, you can select a category here and, um, we'll just go ahead with that. And it's automatically gonna assign a bunch of users. I'm actually gonna remove, um, almost all the users here just so if we do any test processes, we don't start accidentally assigning people. Um, We have a bunch of team members in LeadSimple all the time. So there's a lot of users to remove here. I'll just leave myself in here. Okay. So I don't think there's anything else we really need to set up to start. We'll just jump right to the stages and workflows portion of the process. Um, and what the way to think— so every software that you use for process is going to have its own little nuances and vocabulary of— I usually describe it as like the way it thinks about process. And so the way LeadSimple thinks about process is they have these things called stages, and there's 4 categories of stages. And a stage is, is a major milestone in the completion of a process. And so what we're going to end up with is a few stages for this rent collection and delinquency. And I'll just go ahead and start creating. I'll just kind of start making these up. So we'll create one and just, and just say like start late rent process or something. Let's go back, you know, working delinquent rent. And then maybe we want to have a stage called something like eviction started, or like in eviction. And then we'll probably have like, we'll rename this completed stage. And we'll say like, completed evicted Um, and then we'll have an, we'll, we'll, you know, you, these completed stages here, the major categories of outcomes that you can have with the process, you generally want to have one for each of these. So we can have one called like, um, pay and stay, which is like where they pay off the balance and they end up staying in the property. Um, canceled stages. Uh, we can leave that off for now. I'm going to go ahead and delete this backlog stage because I don't think we need to worry about that.

Yeah. With the, with the completed stages there, you could move the completed evicted stage actually to the canceled, um, yeah, section there because it's more of a like negative outcome as opposed to the outcome we're actually trying to achieve here.

We've, we've canceled their residency basically. Yeah. Okay, I'm good with that. And Clint, like, this is going to be for you. So as you think about like the major milestones as someone moves through the process of being late and then a 3-day and then eventually eviction, what would you call these? Because this is going to be for you. Do you like these names or what would you do here?

Yeah, that, that sounds pretty standard. Yeah, that would work for me.

Okay. So let's go into the start late rent process. And I kind of want to pause here because this particular process is interesting. There's a, there's a few different philosophies on how to deal with someone who's late with rent and when to actually kick off a process. So you and I are both on Buildium, Clint, and you and I both, uh, have— we, we take advantage of Buildium's built-in handling of delinquencies. And Buildium has a great, uh, email setting that you can turn on. So if someone's late with the rent, you can send them a late rent email. And I know that you and I both have that turned on. So you and I wouldn't really want to kick off a process the first day someone is late with rent because Buildium is going to send them the late rent reminder notification. Buildium is automatically going to post a late fee. So there's really no action required by my staff or your staff, it sounds like, during those first few days of a tenant being late. Is that— would you agree with that? Yes, that's accurate. Okay. And Amy, what do you normally see like Is there— I think we were talking earlier, but it sounds like there are a number of folks who don't rely on their property accounting software to handle those things, but instead they go ahead and kick things off like the very first day that it's late. Is that right?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So it can be on the first. Oftentimes it'll actually be on the second. The first one would be more of just a reminder to pay. Some people do build that in. What I've seen is, yes, if you want to be able to customize the message that goes out a bit more, you can do that by having it go out from LeadSimple. And then you can also have text messages go out from LeadSimple as well. So you can have a combination of both or just text messages, because I know, Clint, you mentioned Buildium doesn't send text messages. So you could have those be built out in here and leave the emails to be going out from Buildium. Or have them both in LeadSimple.

Yep. We had a couple Q&A come in that I just want to take a second to address. So Olivia Mitchell asks, would you recommend LeadSimple or process software for property management companies of all sizes? Essentially, yes. Um, I would say if you're under 50 or maybe up to like 100 doors, you may not feel the pain enough just yet. And depending on how sort of technically oriented you are, You may be just happy with the way you're currently doing it, but I would say once you reach that 50 to 100 door mark is when you definitely want to start looking at one of these process solutions. And then we have another question here about the delinquency process from Luis Calderon. I hope I pronounced that right. Hey team, I work for RPM Metro Detroit. Our delinquency process started on the 2nd of the month for any unpaid balance. The issue we have is when the tenants pay in advance in AppFolio, it shows a negative balance. But LeadSimple keeps creating a delinquency process for those properties. One of the possible solutions I got when I approached support about this was adding a condition that delinquent rent is greater than $400, but it still doesn't work. So that sounds like more of a technical thing, and maybe we can look at that when we set up the automation, um, in Autopilot in a little while. So let me pause on that, Luis, and, uh, we will, I will see if there's a way to fix that, uh, once we get to that point. Okay. So what I'm going to assume as we move forward here is that your property accounting software is going to handle the initial late rent notification and the initial late fee posting. I think that most property accounting softwares are sophisticated enough that you can set it up so that the late fee posts and they get an email or some kind of a notification that they're late with the rent. Where we're going to pick up here is when it's time to actually take the next step. And what's the next step for you, Clint, after the— they've gotten the late fee, they've gotten the late rent warning email. What's the next thing that happens and what day is it in the process?

That would be around the 5th of the month. We're going to look at our outstanding balances and pull all of those from our management software. Um, and we use that to create our 3-day notices to be posted.

Okay, great. I'm just putting this here as a task. We may not leave it here exactly like this, but I just wanted to write that out. So basically this is like the trigger that's going to kick this process off. We want a process to start in LeadSimple or whatever your workflow software is. For every single lease on the 5th that still has a balance due. And if you think about it, there's a couple other caveats there, right? And you and I talked about one of them, Clint, which is like, we don't really want to start this process if there's like a $5 balance, and we definitely don't want to start it if there's a negative balance, as, as Luis mentioned. And there's a couple other situations too. We don't want to start it for someone who's already in eviction. Right? Like they're an eviction from the prior month. You also don't want to start it on someone who's in the process of being demanaged or was recently demanaged. We've made that mistake several times. Post a 3-day notice on someone we already demanaged. And let me tell you, that results in some very angry tenants and owners. Raise your hand in the chat if you've ever accidentally done that, because I think it's a common failure scenario. So I wonder if this would actually be a fun time to go into the autopilot settings. And this is where I may need your help, Amy. And set up this trigger, this automation. You ready, Amy?

Mm-hmm.

I'm ready. All right. So should I, do you think I should start with this template or should I just start from scratch?

Uh, you can go ahead and start with the template.

All right. So LeadSimple. So let me just explain what autopilot is. So in LeadSimple, you have the option to have processes start automatically. And that's amazing, by the way. And I love that we use this a lot. Now you can build it yourself or they have some prebuilt templates here for common scenarios. So we're gonna go ahead and use the delinquency template. So I'll click use this template. And let's think about what we gotta, let's give this a name here. We'll call this, I'm gonna go ahead and call this eviction start, eviction process start. And how frequently should this process start? So this is a, you know, evictions are a monthly cadence, right? Rent's due on the first of the month. We have this process that Clint described, and what we really want to have happen is on a certain day of the month, everyone who has a balance due, boom, we start the process. And so for you, Clint, sorry, did you say it was the 4th?

On day 4. Pull the notices there. What's that? The 5th is when we pull the outstanding balance.

Okay. Perfect. So on day 5 at 6:00 AM, we're going to put everyone who meets the conditions below into this stage, which is like the starting stage. So this is like where you would select where you want them to start in the process. And so, and Clint, would we want to give the team time to get into the office and maybe process any like checks that had come in and stuff like that? So do we want to make this like 11:00 AM or something? Perfect. Okay. Oops. Let me do this. Yeah. All right. So then for every unit that matches the following conditions, active in the property management software, yes. So we don't want to start this for, you know, units that are no longer active in the software. And the nice thing here is LeadSimple has prebuilt this. If you just started with a blank template, you'd be manually adding all of these conditions. And that's actually what we did back when we built this. But They've since added this as kind of a pre-built thing. So we've got some questions here to answer. Are your tenants considered delinquent if they owe rent or if they owe any fees? So do we care about just rent that's owed, Clint, or do we care about anything that they owe—water bills, old late fees, or anything else? Or we hang for any outstanding balances. Any outstanding balances. Okay. So we're going to select accounts receivable, amount receivable. Is greater than— and what's the minimum amount that you would post a 3-day for? Like $50. $50. Beautiful. All right, how we doing, chat? Pretend I'm streaming on Twitch. You guys got questions? We liking what we're seeing here? Is this helpful? Do you want to only include units that are tenant occupied? Yes, that would That would make sense. Are there any tenants you want to exclude from starting a delinquency process? So this is where we need to look at other processes. So like if they're in the middle of, um, a move— let's see, property de-management, that's going to be a good one to add here. Um, I'm going to add our eviction process because that's That's actually our process for eviction. So we don't want to include that. Kind of double count. I think that's probably it.

Yeah, you could potentially add move out, but otherwise it would be those two.

And it's going to— I'm assuming it's going to automatically exclude anyone who's already in the process. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So I think I'm good with that. I think I'm going to hit save. I'm going to hit save without turning on. Cause I don't actually want to turn this on cause I don't want to like start an eviction process for people, but all we needed to do to turn this on would be to hit this little switch here. And then the system is automatically going to create a process for everyone who meets those conditions. On the 5th of the month at 11:00 AM. Do you think that's cool, Clint? It's great. All right. So now we're, so now let's go into the process itself. So, so this is where the SOP that you have, um, will be helpful. So what's the first thing that needs, that needs to happen? It sounds like based on what you told me, We need to add them, add to the 3-day list, right? So pretend that your team's running, running one of these for each person who's delinquent. So they each need to be added to the 3-day list. And then what else needs to happen? Do we have to add any charges to the ledger? Do we need to email the owner? Do we need to notify a supervisor? What else needs to happen during this time?

Well, we would not add any charges just personally within our company. We don't have that additional fee. They've already got the late fees added. So this would just be pulling tenant's name, address, and the amount owed and then filling out the 3-day notice to be printed off.

Got it.

Now one thing you could do, and I'm not going to do it today, is you could set it up so that when your team checks off this task, we could set up a Zap that would add the details of that tenant and the amount owed and their address to like a Google Sheet. And so it would basically build it for you as you check those off. What do you think about that idea, Amy?

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I really like that because you mentioned earlier, Clint, that you did a mail merge to make your 3-day notices as well, and that could be automated in here as well.

So we'll pretend that we, that we built that. So I won't have time to do a whole Zap build out here today. Okay. And I added kind of an optional here to add the 3-day posting for the lease ledger, which you don't do that. Um, do we need to notify the owner that their tenant's getting a 3-day?

Uh, we could do that. Um, we haven't because it's not automated.

Ah, perfect. Love this. So we'll go ahead and hit email here, and you're gonna love this, Clint. So what we need to do is create a little automation that's going to email the owner automatically and just give them a heads up, like, hey, just so you know, and we'll write out a little template. But what we want to do is set up contact roles in order to be able to do this. So all we need to do is go back into somewhere— general— and we're going to click plus to add a contact role. We're going to call it owners, and we're going to map that to Buildium rental owners. And this is pretty much exactly what yours would look like, Clint, because you're on Buildium too. But LeadSimple has a sync with, with Buildium and pulls in all the rental owners. So it knows who all the rental owners are. And while we're here, I'm going to go ahead and add another contact role called tenants. I know we should call them residents. All right, let's do that. Residents. Let's get really fancy and call this housing providers. Let's get with the current lingo here today, Clint. I don't know if you're up on that or not. Um, okay. We'll map that to building leases. All right, let's go back to, um, stages and workflows. What we're going to do here is email owners— email housing providers to notify of 3-day. And we're going to click this attach template button. And we're going to create a new template. We're going to call it email to housing providers to notify of 3-day. We're going to call this, um, no action required, your resident is de-linked, is Delinquent on rent. And in here we're going to do a little fun kind of mail merge type thing. So we're going to say dear, and we're going to look for the rental owner first name. Do we have a search at the top here?

Just start typing, it'll search. Okay. But it's also going to be housing provider because you changed it to that.

Housing provider first name. Just a heads up. That your resident, that your property, and we'll do a little property.name, unit, and we'll do a little unit number. Oh, shoot. Is delinquent on rent and we are preparing to post a 3-day notice. No action is required by you at this time. We are just so amazing at keeping our clients up to date that we thought you would like to know. We got this, Clint. All right, so we'll save that.

Question on that, um, it's fine if an owner has one property. If they own an apartment complex, are they going to get 30 emails if they have multiple tenants? Yes. Or will it—

okay. Yeah, and we could get a little fancier and we could add a custom field that would allow owners to opt in and out of these notifications. And that way you could go in and like, if you have big investor owners with lots of units and you know they don't care about this level of detail, you'd be able to just turn it off just for that owner. Okay, so now we're going to go to We're going to select Housing Providers, and we're going to select this template that we just made. So now, as soon as— what's that, Amy?

Sorry, Kyle in the chat just highlighted something else you can do touching on Clint's question around—

ah, yes, Kyle had a good suggestion. You could simply make that email conditional to be excluded based on property type. So basically, Clint, I won't get into all the technical details, but basically the answer to your question is yes, we could, we could sort that out for you. Um, so now what's going to happen. So just to refresh on the 5th at 11:00 AM, everyone who has a delinquent balance over $50 is a process. This process is going to start. It's going to have your team check this task. And then, you know, you would delete this task because this isn't applicable to you. And then Instantly, this email would go out to all of your owners. And if you click this lightning bolt, that would be happening automatically, or you can have your team go through and just click. They'll see the preview of the email and they can click send. Anything else that needs to happen here? Um, I mean, basically we need to, we need to post the 3-day. Or like, you know, basically confirm 3-day was posted. Where does the picture get saved to?

My cell phone.

Okay. Save in Clint's, you know, iPhone folder or whatever makes sense there. And then it's just kind of like nothing really happens until the 3 days is up pretty much.

That's the tenant's grace period to come in and, and get current. Yep. Or to work out a payment plan with us.

Okay. And so what would happen there is if as tenants paid off, which I know from experience that around half of them or whatever will actually pay off that balance during those 3 days, you would just go in and you would update the stage for those tenants to be completed pay and stay. And then no other actions would, would happen.

You could actually automate that step, Peter. If you go back to that stage, it, it'll involve a little bit of conditional logic. You would make every step here conditional on the amount receivable field being above $50. So those steps will only show up if that condition is true. Once it's no longer true, then—

look at that is not right there, Amy. Oh, that's pretty cool.

Yeah, if anybody hasn't seen that yet, they're already a little bit of inside baseball. Okay, um, that's live. So yeah, I would do is between, do 50 min and, uh, some big high number for Yeah, just like that.

Perfect. So you could make— yeah, so, and then, and then basically it would move to pay and stay automatically. Yep. Okay. So what Amy's saying is we can make all of these conditional on there still being a balance. And then as soon as there was no longer a balance, all of these tasks would disappear from your team's to-do list. And this process would automatically move to the completed stage. Yep, exactly. That's pretty cool. I don't know if I would have thought of that, so I'm glad you're hearing me. I don't think we have that like set up in our, in our system actually. Really? Yeah, that's really cool. Okay, go in there after the webinar. Yep, I'm getting value out of this too. Okay, so let's go to the working Okay. And actually, let's add— how do we want to get to the next stage, Amy?

So, yeah, you can go ahead and add a stage change task. Okay. And then make that also be— you want it to be the same conditions as the rest of the steps. So, as long as we have a balance above 50, it keeps moving forward. But then if it ever dips below that, it'll move straight to either— because in this stage it'll go to pay and stay, but you can have a couple of different completed step, like, stages in there and have it be paid during grace period, you know, kind of when they actually paid.

Okay. LeadSimple's not happy with me. Let me reload that. Okay. Processes, delinquency for client. Settings, stages and workflows. Okay. Okay. So I don't want to spend too long on this, but we have a stage change option here where we can move it to the next stage, uh, which would be working delinquent rent. And we can set up some fancy automations so that that doesn't happen when it's not supposed to. And it does happen automatically when it is supposed to. Um, and let me kind of pause, man, that this hour is coming up quick, but I want to highlight that, like, there's all kinds of fun stuff we can do with automations and conditional logic. I really, really encourage people to just get started with the simplest possible process. And we've talked about some fun stuff that you can do, but I don't want that to be an impediment from launching a process, whether that's the delinquency or eviction process, or whether that's a move-in or a move-out process. Don't feel like you need to get all of the details sorted out and all of the conditional logic and all of the autopilot stuff. Just launch with like the bare bones, basic, whatever you wrote down when you documented your process, just launch with that and just go back and add the stuff. 'Cause what you really want to have happen is you want your team to get comfortable with this and start using it. You don't want them to be intimidated by it or feel like something's gonna happen automatically that they don't understand. And so I really want to highlight whether you're working with LeadSimple or any other software, Start simple, like dead simple. Um, and then you can add complexity later.

Yep. I mean, the efficiency gains that you gain from covering the most common use is really, really valuable. So waiting too long, I like to, um, I like the 20, 80, 20 rule. Like get it, get it 80% of the way there and don't try to cover the extra 20% of all the variables that happen once every.

Yeah. Amy, why don't you go ahead and take— we've got some really good questions that came in.

Yeah. Yeah. So let's cover a couple of these. The first one is, is the system smart enough to exclude weekends from those 5 days grace period? So I think this was asked during the time we were looking at Autopilot. So you can have Autopilot started on the 5th and then decide inside of each workflow, each stage, when you actually want the steps to fall due for your team. So Peter, if you go ahead and click that workflow settings button kind of in the top right here, right there, then you can see what days and times that you actually want the steps to fall due. And then if they are falling due on the weekend, it'll push them to Monday. Mm-hmm. We got some more questions from Merle. What if we're divided by pods? Is there a condition for property groups so it can be automatically divided? So yes, you can have your autopilot start by looking at different groups. Let's say you have, again, some leases that, that aren't late until the 6th, the 7th, the 10th. You would have them in their own little property group and have an autopilot rule start on the 10th just for them while all the rest of them are starting on the 2nd, on the 5th. And that actually covers Ronaldo's question as well, because what do you do with NSF and bounced payments? You can build in a couple more autopilot rules that will pick those up again. So let's say they paid and then it bounces. You can have it pick those up again at other points during the month as well. So if they go back to being delinquent, it can pick those up and restart the process for them. And because that's a new rule, it can start in an NSF stage rather than in the regular stages that the process usually flows through.

Yep.

All right, is that all of them?

Looks like it. Okay, so let's assume, Clint, that the 3 days has passed. Um, what now needs to happen with those who still have an outstanding balance?

So at that point, we would have conversations with owners on if we need to start the eviction process for these tenants, especially if they haven't reached out to us to work out a payment plan. Mm-hmm. And then as far as the eviction process in Ohio goes, it's fairly straightforward. Just send copies of the lease and 3-day notice to the attorneys and start it there.

Okay, and is that something you can email over? Yeah, so we— I won't go through it again, but you could create another email template here, you know, to help streamline this process. You can also have a call step, so the call owner and discuss eviction status, you would actually want that to be a, a call call owner to discuss eviction process, because that'll set up a kind of nice little click-to-call situation with using the LeadSimple phone integrations. Okay. And what then happens after you send it to the attorneys? What's, what's the next step?

Let us know the court date. So there would be a contingency there on whether we're going to allow the tenant to come back and pay before that eviction hearing. Some tenants, they've done this multiple times and the owner's done dealing with them and they don't want us to collect or to retain them at that point. So there would be a decision point there.

Okay. And then once you have that discussion with the owner and let's say the owner says absolutely not, don't allow this tenant to pay, I want to get them out. Where do you actually like document that so that you know that?

We would just keep that in the notes on, on Buildium. Okay.

Um, add to Buildium lease ledger notes, allow pay and stay or do not allow. Right. Because that's a step, you know, that's an important step that you just, and I know that you do it automatically just because you've done it 100 times, but if you were training like a virtual assistant, you would need them to take this step. Like, hey, after you talk to the owner, add to the notes. Right. And that may be on your SOP document.

I do not have that documented yet, but it is an important call out.

So, okay, so then we'll send a copy of the lease in 3 days to attorney. And then once you— and just because in Ohio and maybe it's similar everywhere, like you're going to get— you're going to hear back eventually on like a court date. What do you do once you hear— once you know when the court date is, do you like add a calendar event or where do you document that?

Yeah, I add it to my calendar and then our attorney also sends out reminder emails. Perfect.

And this is another one where you could, you could have a little, um, step instruction here, like add date of eviction here. And you, we can have a custom field that we would set up and you could actually turn this into something where you just check the box and we would, we could create a Zap that would add it to your Google Calendar automatically. Once you selected the date of the hearing in the, in the custom field, which would, which would show up right here. Is there a better way to do that, Amy, or is that how you would do that?

Mm-hmm. You could do that. You could also use the tasks integration that we have with Google Calendar, but it's a pretty simple, um, little 15-minute reminder that'll get added to your calendar using that.

Oh, that's cool. I don't think I knew about that. Mm-hmm. You can decide, you can choose. Is that what this button is?

Yeah. So you would use that and then you would, when setting up the integration, choose the delinquency process.

Okay, that's cool. I didn't know that. Yep. Okay. Okay. I know we just got like 2 minutes left. I'm sorry, Clint, that we didn't get a little bit further into this process, but we got into a lot of really good discussions. Is there, like, I think you kind of get the idea of what we're doing here. We could go through and, you know, add all of the detailed additional tasks, like what happens once they're in eviction court and all that. Anything that's like not making sense here. And the other thing too, I want to highlight is like these stage names, you can change these, you can reorder them, you can rename them. I want, these should really be useful and make sense for you and your company.

This is great. Just an automated workflow. Yeah, that's what I've been looking for.

Okay, cool. I'm trying to think if there's any other, like, what— Amy, how would you handle the— those kind of nuances around leases that you inherit with different dates of things and stuff like that? We talked a little bit about that.

Yeah, it would depend on how many you had and how varied they were. If you had a group of them that were very similar, I would just recommend putting them into a property group and having them start via another Autopilot rule. If they were others, I know others recommend getting them moved on to your lease as quickly as possible. But you, there may be, depending on kind of what the variable looks like. Be like, all right, well, these are the ones we know we're just gonna be still handling manually until we get 'em moved over.

Yep. Okay. Any questions, Clint? You feel like you're good and I can get you a copy of this if you end up signing up for LeadSimple. I can share this exact template with you.

That'd be great. I appreciate you giving me the opportunity here.

All right, great. Well, um, I think I have one or two more of these coming up. Uh, we do about one a month, so keep an eye on my newsletter. If you want to, you know, maybe even volunteer for the next one or at least tune in, I'll drop a link to sign up for my newsletter. I'm guessing most of you are subscribed, but if you're not, I write a weekly newsletter. It comes out every Friday, just news and information for property managers. Anything else we want to mention, Amy?

Just answering one last question about how to do the task reminder. So I just dropped the instructions, the help article on that. There in the chat, and I can send that in the follow-up email too.

Perfect. And we'll send the recording out. I'll also publish that on my YouTube channel. If you just Google my name YouTube, you can see there's— I've got a bunch of property management related stuff, including previous recordings of these of different processes. So thanks everybody for coming out for the live workshop today, and thank you, Clint, for being our volunteer. Really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. All right, bye everybody. Everyone.