PM Process Workshop: The Lease Renewal Process with Madeline Vinson

All right, welcome in everybody. We're going to just take maybe 1 minute and let folks come on into the Zoom. How you doing today, Madeline?

I'm doing wonderful. I am enjoying the PM Systems Conference. It's, um, that's why I'm in this hotel room setup. I had to pack my ring light and microphone for this special occasion. It's been a blast hanging out with, with all the industry geeks.

Do you like to check luggage or do you try to fit everything into a carry-on?

Oh no, I check as much as possible. I actually, I had a carry-on for this and then at the airport I was like, I'm checking it. I'm not carrying this around.

I go back and forth. I really like traveling. Like, I like being on the plane with nothing but my wallet and my phone and AirPods.

That's terrifying.

But then, uh, at other, other times I'm like, well, I don't really wanna wait for baggage claim and I can fit everything in a carry-on.

So yeah, I don't know if it's just cuz I was a part of a bigger family, but like we, like luggage was just inevitable. Um, yeah, it doesn't faze me. Um, this time I had like, I had a packed bag that I knew I was gonna check and then I had what I thought was gonna be a carry-on. And then my personal item and my carry-on, I just decided at the last minute, I was like, I don't wanna carry this around. I just take it. I get a free bag too with my credit card. And so I'm like, just take it. I don't care.

Oh yeah, that's great. All right, well, uh, we've got a great crowd here today. Let's kick it off. I'd like everyone in the chat, open up the chat window and make sure it's set to everyone. I'm gonna give you two options for the chat. You can either say the temperature where you are. And if I want to see the coldest temperature, who's got the coldest temperature? Or if you're at the Systems Conference, just put systems in the chat. Let's see who's at the Systems Conference tuning in today and possibly ducking out of one of their sessions or, or, uh, panels. All right, I'm seeing 12 degrees in Maryland, 55 degrees. I'm jealous of that. 15 degrees, 90 degrees. Holy cow. That sounds amazing. All right. If you're at Systems Conference, type systems, or maybe you're scared and you don't want to get in trouble by being on a workshop when you're supposed to be at a— Madeline typed it. All right. Good. Honolulu. Beautiful. 74 degrees there.

My sweet spot is like 65. Anything above, anything below, and I'm just unhappy.

Yep. All right, so thanks everyone for tuning in. So if you haven't been to one of these before, I'm doing these about once a month here, and it's basically a really informal live process building workshop. So what you're going to see today is where I'm going to talk a little bit here about how I think about systems and processes at a property management company, and then we have a volunteer Nicole, who will be coming up later, and we're actually going to build her lease renewal process right here, right now in real time. And so she's, she's provided us with a little bit of documentation ahead of time just so we have a vague sense of what she's got going on. But you're going to get to see how we think about building a new process. And ideally, by the end of the 60 minutes, we're actually going to have a completed lease renewal process built out for her. That she could launch with later today with her team. That's, that's what I strive for. We may not quite hit that, but that's what, that's what we're going to go after. So, Madeline, before we sort of advance our agenda here, why don't you take a minute and introduce yourself? Because I'm realizing now that a lot of the audience may not have met you or seen you before. And then for anyone tuning in who hasn't met me before, I own RL Property Management in Columbus, Ohio. We manage about 700 doors., and I come from a background of systems engineering, so I love bringing like an engineering approach to property management. So Madeline, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Yeah. Um, so I am a process consultant. I mess around in LeadSimple for fun. Um, I came from property management. I helped my parents' company scale from 250 doors to over 1,000 in about 18 months. Um, so I have been through the gauntlet on the property manager side and I've learned what works and what definitely does not work. Um, and now I, I like to help, help other property managers do the same.

Perfect. All right. So I want to show one of my favorite visuals here on the screen. Let me share my screen briefly. So what you're looking at right here is how I think about process at a property management company. Now, this happens to be a LeadSimple branded item, but it's really generic to any property management company.

Definitely tried and true.

Yeah. So this follows the, um, well, there's a couple of different things going on here, but you can think of each of these color blocks as a process, sort of like a key process at your company. And you can see we've got like owner sales process and then our owner and property onboarding. There's possibly a make-ready process if you're onboarding a vacant unit, um, marketing applications and eventually move-in. Delinquencies and evictions. And then this sort of blue button here is like the occupied status basically. And then that can move to a lease renewal process, which we're going to talk about today. And that can have a few different outcomes. And eventually you're going to have a move out and that's going to lead either to, you know, the marketing process again or property sale and/or owner offboarding. So the, the thing I like about this visual is it's, I like the decision and the decisions that it made about where to break up the processes. I've seen some people's processes and they have like, for example, they'll have like the marketing and the applications and the move-in all as part of like one big process. To me, I think that's just like a little bit too much to have in one process. So the thing I like about this is the way it's, It sort of has the divide, like the start and end points of the different processes philosophically is how I think about things. So to set the stage, we're going to be doing a lease renewal process today. So what kicks that off, and you can see it here on the screen, is it's basically a time trigger is what sets off a lease renewal process. And they have 120 days before move-in here. You could do 90 days or whatever you want to do. And you can also see the end states here, which is either lease renewed or the owner-tenant not renewing, and that leads to a move out. So when you're dealing with process, I think a lot about trigger, which is like what starts the process, and then how do you know when the process is completed? Like what's the end state of the process? Anything you want to add here, Madeline?

No, I think you covered it. I think the, the piece that I've worked a lot with people is not only what triggers it, but also who manages what. And so you want to have a clear delineation on, okay, if your leasing specialist does your, your application and move-in, if there's a handoff to somebody, when does that happen? And so we want to ask not just what and when, but also who.

Yep. And that part of it is where software is very helpful because you can document a process with pen and paper. And you could print that out and just pass it around the office. Uh, and we used to do that, but it, it gets really hard to understand who's supposed to be doing what and whether they're done or not. And like very, becomes very difficult to see the status of all of the open, you know, lease renewals in this example. So, yep. All right. Um, let's see here. So if you, if you don't currently have your lease renewal documented at your management company and you're just sort of operating on an ad hoc basis, you're just sort of remembering all the things that need to be done. I want to just give you a couple pointers because I run into a lot of folks who they have this nagging feeling like they need to document their processes. You hear that phrase a lot, but they're not really sure how to do it. Madeline, what— and I've got a couple of thoughts, but what— how do you approach this? Like if someone just approaches you at a conference and you're like, hey, I want to start documenting my processes, what should I do?

Yeah, the, the first and most important step is that you have the right people in the room to do it because you, if you're the broker or even another key decision maker, there is a chance that you're— there's a really high chance that your team knows more about the process than you do. And so when I sit down with a team, and document the process before we start building it, I don't just talk to the broker owner, I talk to the leasing assistant, I talk to the property manager, talk to the maintenance director maybe, and really get a full-fledged build-out of what this is supposed to look like. Because it also— you'll get into conversations and you'll, you'll say, you know, we do this and then broker's like, wait, really? Like we still do that? Yeah. And so it just it adds some, some levels of depth to the conversation.

Yeah, super important to get the people who are actually doing this work right now involved with any sort of a process documentation or upgrade or software rollout. The other thing I always tell people is don't be afraid to just start with pen and paper. You don't need fancy software to document your existing processes. In some cases, that can actually slow you down and be a hindrance and sort of feel overwhelming. So you can start with Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or just pen and paper and take your lease renewal process, figure out what triggers this and how do we know when we're done, what are the end states, and then just write down everything that needs to happen. Talk to the people who are doing it right now, uh, show them and get them to give you feedback because one thing you may have experienced is the longer you've been owning or running a management company and the the further up you move in the organization, the more disconnected you become from how things are actually done. So like I have in my mind an idea of how we do our lease renewal process. And it's probably wrong. Cause I haven't actually done it in a long time. We're going to dive into my LeadSimple account and take a look. And I'm probably going to be like, oh wow, I didn't know we were doing that. Or where's this thing? We're not doing that anymore. That's all very normal. And it's fine. You just need to make sure that when you are trying to document something or move it to a new platform, you don't want to operate from the outdated version you may have in your head of how you thought this process was running.

Yeah, definitely. It also, I, even in my own business, I will take, uh, just scratch paper and just start with steps and then try and categorize it into like milestones. Um, and that if you don't, if you're not sure how to think about a process, that's maybe a good starter. Um, some people think really linearly. I'm a little bit more like all over the place. And so just getting all the things out in front of me helps a ton.

Yeah. All right. So I want to, I want to do a little sneak peek and then we're going to kind of, then we're going to bring up our volunteer, Nicole. But I want to give the viewers today a little sneak peek of what's possible with your lease renewal process, because I think it might get some people excited about where we're going with this. So let me share my screen. So what you're looking at here is live data from my property management company. And this is all of the active lease renewal processes right now. You can see we've got about 74 of them, and that's pretty typical because we, like I said, we manage around 700 doors. And so over here on the right-hand side, you can see what stage the process is in. And we can scroll down. I mean, I'm not going to scroll down through all 74 of these, but obviously you can see the name, the property. Assigned to the overall process, and then if there's any overdue tasks. And it looks like right now we're caught up on everything, which is awesome. If I click settings here and then we go into the one thing I really want to show everybody is this autopilot setting.

My favorite thing ever.

Yeah. So every, every Monday at 6:00 AM, this little automation runs and it kicks off the lease renewal process automatically for every active occupied lease that meets these criteria. So if the lease end date is less than 90 days away, the current move-out date is empty, and we have that there to make sure we don't, you know, trigger this for a, a property that's already in a lease renewal process. If it's active in our PM software and there's not an existing eviction process or a property de-management or some of these other processes that it wouldn't make sense to run lease renewal process if they were in eviction. If it meets all of those criteria, it kicks off the lease renewal process automatically for all properties that meet those conditions. And if we click on Autopilot history for this rule, you can see that Monday, this Monday at 6 AM, it kicked off 8 lease renewals. Last Monday it kicked off 11. The Monday before that it kicked off 20. So it knows the upcoming moveouts and it's kicking off these lease renewals automatically. And when that happens, the first step in the process gets assigned to the team member responsible for it, and they'll see it appear in their task list when they walk in in the morning. And it'll be there with a, with a due date for that task. And as that person completes their tasks, it automatically assigns tasks to the next person in the process. So that's kind of like the beautiful end state that's possible. Um, now I'm showing an example here using LeadSimple. There's some other software that can do similar things. I don't know if they all have quite this level of power, but, um, this is sort of like just a little teaser of what's possible. We, we may not quite get there today with the process that we're building from scratch, but I just wanted to give folks a sense of, uh, where we can go with this. All right. So Any sort of additional preamble thoughts, Madeline, before we bring up our volunteer and start getting into the heart of what we're doing today, which is, which is going to be building her lease renewal process?

No, I think you covered it. I'm ready. I'm excited.

All right, great. So I'd like to welcome to the stage Nicole. Why don't you unmute and turn on your video, Nicole? And Nicole generously— I put out a call in my newsletter and asked if anyone would be brave enough to volunteer and come on the stage today and let us build, build their process. And Nicole was gracious enough to agree to that. Welcome, Nicole. How are you doing?

I'm good. How are you?

I'm doing well. Um, excuse me. If you wouldn't mind, just take a minute or two, introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about, you know, the management company and, and where you're located, about how many doors and maybe a little bit about your history with property management.

Yeah. So my name is Nicole. I'm the director of property management at D'Angelo Realty Group. I've been with the company about 6 years. I started off as an assistant to the broker and kind of have worked my way up. We manage about 400 doors on the rental side and about 400 doors on the association side. We have a very small team. It's myself, 2 other property managers, and then our broker.

Um, that is a small team.

It's a very small team for the amount that we do. Uh, you know, so our struggle and the reason that I asked to kind of be involved in this is that we don't have a lot of handoff to other people. We kind of own the process from start to finish, uh, but it's not being followed consistently. You know, we don't have a clear delineation of who's responsible for what if you know, if you're kind of involved in everything. So it's been a struggle to kind of get everyone on board and doing the same thing every single time.

Yeah, I think a lot of property managers listening can relate to that. So ahead of today, you sent along to Madeline and I some of the documents and spreadsheets that you're using to track lease renewals. Maybe just share a little bit about like your history of trying to tackle this problem. It sounds like you had started with like a detailed checklist and now you're using Excel. Tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah. So the checklist to the Excel spreadsheet has kind of been developed by the person that's been responsible for it. We've had a lot of turnover, so, you know, we've kind of handed off ownership to, to whomever was there who's going to be responsible for new renewals. And they have established their own way of doing things. You know, the checklist This is kind of what started just a conversation with the team. And then we had a new girl start and she is more visual and wanted to have a spreadsheet that she could access and realized the paper was kind of getting lost in the shuffle. So we are still kind of ironing out what is best. And yeah.

Yeah, that's totally relatable once again. And I'm getting some of this stuff pulled up and I'm going to, if it's okay with you, I'm going to share briefly some of the stuff that you're using currently just so folks can get a sense for that. Okay. So let me share this. So this right here is like a lease renewal checklist that it sounds like you used to use. Correct. Yeah. This is from 2023 and I see some pretty typical steps in here. You know, send the renewal, DocuSign. Schedule the renewal inspection, invoice renewal fee to owner. That's all very normal stuff. You can see it's all kind of marked up with, you know, as things were done, we've got dates here and who did it. Very, very normal. This could be in any property management office and across the USA. And then, then your new person came in and they're like, you know what, I'm a visual person. I like spreadsheets. And they created this document. So we've got like a history here of months. Who is it? What was the address? What type of lease? You know, was it completed? We've got all these tabs and, you know, a list of upcoming move-outs. And what I'm seeing here is kind of like two pieces that are both really important that a sort of holistic process solutions should solve. I'm seeing a list of steps, like tasks that need to happen for a specific lease renewal for like the renewal for 218 4th Street, Apartment 1. And then over here in the spreadsheet, I'm seeing like a tracker, like where is everything at? What— who's done it? Is it ready? Like what— it's sort of like a more of a higher level view of what all is happening with each of the lease renewals. And they're both important. Like, it's, it's really important both that, you know, your, your steps for each process are documented and followed. And it's also important to understand for each instance of the active process, meaning each lease renewal that's in progress, where is it in the process and making sure that none of those balls are being dropped. Right. Does that feel right to you?

It does feel right. I think the important part that you pointed out was like the documentation, because we're so small and we're talking so frequently, you know, it kind of is just happening without documenting it or following like a specific order of steps. So then, you know, we'll come back to one or I'll notice that something happened and, and there are things that are being missed. Or they're being renewed at the wrong rate, or they're being renewed, but it's not getting updated in Buildium because everyone is kind of involved.

Yep. Totally relate to that. So, uh, what I'm kind of doing in the background here is I'm gonna go ahead and create our new process so that we can get started with, with building yours. Um, let's see here.

Nicole, I imagine while Peter's pulling that up, you probably have also run into not knowing, like, because lease renewals are what I would say a high-touch process are. And so your email to the owner or email to the tenant, you have to go search somebody's inbox for, for what was even said, right?

Exactly, exactly. Because we're not— and that is kind of what I, you know, touched on briefly before we got started, is that, you know, we are not utilizing our property management software to the to its full capacity in terms of sending emails directly from Buildium or following those, you know, kind of prompts that even Buildium includes. So we're waiting, you know, and then renewals are getting hung up and we're at 25 days until the lease end date, but we haven't gotten an email back from an owner or we haven't gotten a signature from a resident.

Yeah. Yeah. It, it's hard to remember who you talked to or, or what was even said and it, it, It would be nice to have a centralized place for that, probably.

Yes, absolutely.

Yep. Okay. So what I did is I went into LeadSimple. So the example I'm going to be using LeadSimple today to sort of demo this, but this isn't a sales pitch for LeadSimple. You can use whatever workflow or process software feels great for you. We used to do this on Process Street. It worked really good. Um, now the reason I use LeadSimple is because Buildium has a direct integration with LeadSimple. So it can pull in all of my lease data and my owner data and my tenant data. And that's what enables that automation, which kicks off the lease renewals automatically. And it, because it knows who the owner is, it can like automatically send an email to them for approval and lots of fun stuff like that. But, you know, again, I'm, I'm, what I'm hoping to do here is keep this generic enough and explain my thinking in a way that you could take this and use it with a different software or even for something completely unrelated to property management. So, uh, I will do my best to, to do that here, but to show this graphically, I am going to be using LeadSimple. So, okay. Let's see here. So we, what I did was I just created like a brand new process in LeadSimple and I just called it Nicole lease renewal. And what you start with here is, uh, if you go to the stages and workflows area, that's kind of like the main area. Where you, you're gonna build your process in LeadSimple. I want to take a second and explain the concept of stages. Actually, maybe Madeline probably could do a better job of me of explaining what the different stages are in LeadSimple. Do you wanna take a stab at that?

Yeah, absolutely. And feel free to chime in. So in my mind and in, in my experience, stages are the key milestones. So you like just take a lease renewal, for example, you would have the prep work to take to say, do we even want to renew this tenant? And then you have, you know, talking to the owner and seeing does the owner want to renew the tenant? And if so, how much rent do we want to offer? You take that and then there's the tenant and deciding if they want to renew. And then there's the ending of sending the lease and actually updating your PM system. And so each of those things could be broken out into stages and then you, you would all always want to build it to where it ends in a lease renewed. And so then your other stages would be what happens if the lease didn't get renewed or if something had to go on pause or maybe the owner's selling. And so those would all be different. Maybe folders is a different way to think about it too.

Yeah. So I want to start here by, by putting in like the end stages. So if we think about a lease renewal, we kind of saw it on the diagram here, there, the visual. What are the different ways a lease renewal process can end? Well, we can end with a, you know, lease renewal completed, basically. Um, actually, I'm just going to rename this one lease renewal completed. So basically, like, the lease was renewed, sort of success. We could have, um, lease renewal. We could have, uh, Madeline, do you put the move out, like, you know, non-renewal move out? Would you consider that a canceled stage?

A canceled stage, because the goal of the lease renewal is to renew lease. And so anything other than that is not complete. Yep.

A different— okay. And I guess those are the only two stages.

Lease renewal. The other, the other one I would add, especially for Buildium users, would be, um, a place to put them if they decided to go month to month.

Nice.

Because you're gonna want to trigger the next lease renewal. Um, that, that's important.

So I'm just gonna call that rolled month to month under the completed stage.

If you get really fancy, you can add emojis to the titles. I'm a confetti girl, and so all of my green ones, I add the confetti emoji.

It's pretty cool. I have to go copy paste that somewhere because we don't have a little emoji dropdown here. So I'll save that for another day. Um, okay. So we started with the end stages here. One of the things that I would do on this non-renewal— we're kind of working backwards here— is I would actually create a stage change here. Sorry, not a stage change. I would, I would do a create process, and, um, basically this lets you kick off another process automatically. And in this situation, I would want to kick off our move-out process. Basically, as soon as we know that they're not renewing, that they're going to be moving out, great, let's kick off the move-out process. And that sets off a whole other chain of events. So we can select move, move, there we go. I think we call it our lease ending process. There we go. So it'll carry over all the data, which is really cool. And you can click this lightning bolt to make that happen automatically. All right. So let's finish up our stages here. So remember, a stage is a major milestone in the completion of a process. Madeline, what do you think? Do we want like a sort of starting stage, like lease renewal initiated, and then maybe like the main work, working the lease renewal part?

Yeah, I typically do a lease prep and just kind of the, the back end of just making sure we want to do that and then break it into owner side and tenant side of the process.

Okay. Owner tasks. We'll do another one called tenant tasks. Great. So we've got our stages here. And this is kind of how I like to think about processes is you start from a high level. What are the major milestones here as we go along? One thing I want to reinforce throughout this whole thing today is that this is probably going to change by the time we're done. You may rename things, you may reorder them, you may add or remove stages. That's all completely normal and completely fine. This is kind of a learn-as-you-go type of activity. And I want this part to feel approachable and even kind of fun because this is all in draft mode. We're not going to accidentally kick off an email and go, you know, email all tenants by accident or something. So this is like the, the fun part for me. I mean, I know I'm kind of like a systems nerd, but I don't want folks to be scared of these stages, reordering them, renaming them, and just playing around with what makes sense for you. That's kind of what also I want to hit on is like, Nicole, does this make sense for you? Like, is this how you think about your lease renewals?

Yeah, it does. The tricky part is that I would say probably 25% of our owners are completely uninvolved. We don't have to check with them on a renewal price. We don't require any of their signatures. They just expect for things to be handled from start to finish.

Okay, great. And what we can do is we can even maybe like add a little question at the beginning of the process that'll say, does this owner want to be involved in the renewal? And you'll be able to select yes or no. And, um, let's actually do that right now. So let's create a custom field for this process. We're going to call it, does the owner need to approve renewal? We'll make that multiple choice and the options will just be yes, no. So then when we're setting up the lease prep here, we're just going to have a see instructions, select if owner should be involved. Madeline, I'm getting a little rusty here. Am I going in the right direction?

Yeah, no, that's perfect. And so it also over time there's ways to make it to where you only have to ask this question one time. And so hopefully in the future, for the next time you run that lease renewal, you may not have to answer that again.

Yes. Yeah. So that, that's a good point, Madeline. So basically when you run this process now, it's going to prompt you to select whether the owner should be involved or not, and we'll be able to use conditional logic elsewhere to skip steps if, for example, if they selected no, we'll skip the steps that talk about like getting approval from the owner on the new rent amount and things like that. Um, outside of that, do these stage names kind of resonate with you? Or like, would you prefer to see like resident instead of tenant? Do you like—

Oh no, I think that's good.

This all looks good to you? Yeah. Okay. So let's go into lease prep. I'm just going to start by like copying off some of the steps that you already had listed on that lease renewal process that, you know, you look like it was created like Microsoft Word. Okay. So the first one here is like create folder in Zipforms using renewal template. And if Wolf was on here, he'd be telling me how to automate this with Zapier.

And you can get about it.

Yeah. So you can, I'm sure there's a way to use Zapier to create this automatically. Um, and that's something like you could come back to and, or maybe you could engage Madeline or someone on your team to like make this really fun and fancy. But that's not really what we're gonna do today. Today I just wanna get the basics down. And I actually think that's best practice when you're building a process. Just keep it dead simple the first time. Use it for a few weeks and run the process a bunch of times, tune it and tweak it. And then you can come back and add the really fun, powerful stuff later on. Once things have settled down a little bit, I want the thing— I want the process that we build to feel really approachable, uh, and I'm very understandable and not scary. Yeah. All right. So then the next one here is Kyla, Kayla sends renewal form to Nicole. So this would be an example where like we would assign this to Kayla. Like obviously Kayla's not on my team, but if she was, we would have her added to the process and I would be able to select her here. And then anytime that. It reached this kind of stage in the renewal, it would automatically notify her that she had this open task, and then she would be able to go and just do that. Okay. Okay. So I'm just looking over here at this form that you have. Anything else that you're doing during the lease prep? Like, do you Do you complete like a market rent analysis to figure out like what the, what the actual market rent is for the property to decide how much the renewal should be?

So we typically just renew at a 4% increase every year. Okay. Unless instructed by the owners.

Yep. That's easy enough. Okay. All right. So I'm clicking the right arrow here to move over to owner tasks. It looks like there's a few owner tasks in here next. So there's a task here that says renewal form sent to owner via DocuSign. Now this is another one where we could turn this actually into like an email template. Um, so I can click email here and I could just do, you know, send renewal form to owner. And at this point, I'm going to have to go into my settings. Um, general. No. Yeah, general. I always do that wrong every time. Uh, add contact role. We're going to call this owner and I'm going to map that to my building and rental owners. And then if I go back into this stage, I can select owner from the dropdown here. Then I can click attach template. I'm going to create a new one. Nicole owner form. Subject, your property lease renewal. You know, dear, dear owner, please see attached form, et cetera. So you could attach a form to this. You can even do like mail merge. So you could say like, regarding your property, and then we can select this little dot, dot, dot, and we can select the property name. Hit save, select this. So now when you get to this part of the process, you can literally just click this. It'll pop up and give you a little preview, and then you can click send. Okay. So that will save you from a whole bunch of steps because it automatically populates with the owner's email address. It automatically knows what property you're talking about. And it just, it's really cool and fancy. So what is on that owner form? Do you know?

Yep. So it is, and I have, we have, we have a couple of different ones. We have the one that Jenny, that Buildium generates when you generate a renewal offer. And it is actually sends out to the tenant, but we send it to the owner first just to make sure that they're agreeable to the terms that we have generated in the renewal offer. And then once we get that back, then we do a change in terms in DocuSign and send it to the owner to sign first, and then it automatically goes to the resident.

Okay. And this is an example of like where some owners, like you wouldn't have to do this part.

Correct.

Yeah. Okay. So, I'm going to click this. I don't know what you call this, but I'm going to click this where it says conditions. And I'm going to select this: does the owner need to approve renewal? Is yes. So, now this step is only going to appear when in that first part when you launch the process, you selected yes to that question. Okay. If you selected no, this won't appear in the process for that property. So that's like a really simple example of a custom field and conditional logic. That's probably about as complicated as I was, as I would want to get for when you're like first launching a process. What do you think, Madeline?

Yeah, I actually make it a rule of thumb, especially on like third-party automations. I want a process to run anywhere between 45 and 90 days before we do anything fancy. You have to know that your basic stuff works well.

Yeah. So it looks like there's a couple other owner tasks that I'm going to add and then we can move on to the resident tasks. Let me catch up on the chat here, see if there's anything I want to address. Okay. So once completed by owner renewal form. Oh, that's to be sent to resident. Okay. So actually I think that— is there anything else you do with owners? Um, or does this form like take care of all of your owner approvals?

It kind of takes care of all of the approvals.

Okay, great. So maybe there's a step here that's like, if owner requested any changes, update lease renewal doc. Does that sound about right?

Yeah.

Yep.

Okay. And then I would probably add a question of like, do we want to continue or are we moving forward so that if not, it changes to the non-renewal stage before we get to the tenant part.

Okay. Um, does the owner want to continue with the lease renewal? So then how would you handle this? What would you, what would you select down here, Madeline?

So I would add a custom field that would say the same thing. Yes, no. And then they would answer it based off of how the owner communication went.

All right, I'm just gonna do custom field here.

We can follow along, we got it.

Yep. So then depending on the answer there, it would—

a stage change. Yeah, stage conditions.

Yeah. Okay, so we, we would select conditions here and we would have a stage change. It would either go to tenant tasks or, um Non-renewal. Is that what you're thinking? Perfect. Yeah. So basically, you know, we would have another custom field here just depending if the owner wants to proceed. If they do, we would have conditional logic that would automatically move it to tenant tasks. If they don't, we would just move it to non-renewal. And again, the lightning bolt here that I was clicking just means this is going to happen automatically. All right. So let's go back, back out to our, our stages here. So in tenant tasks, it looks like the first one is, um, send renewal form to tenants. Does it go to all the tenants or just one?

I mean, it goes to all of them on the lease.

Okay. So I'm going to put tenants. And then one thing I really like about LeadSimple is this instructions here. Um, so if I click that, I'll say, note, the renewal form goes to all tenants on the lease. And that way, when you're actually running the process, you can click that and see that explanation, which is really great for like training new people. Ideally, you want to put how to do it where you do it. And because all of your work is going to be happening in LeadSimple. You're going to want to document like step by step how to do everything within these instructions. So like, for example, on this owner tasks, like you may want to have instructions here of like, you know, what to do if the owner requests changes, like step, step 1, confirm changes are okay with the broker in charge. Step 2, update the document. Step 3, resend for eSig to owner. You know, whatever it is, you can update that. But that's just like a nice little, you know, convenience for whether you have to run this and you haven't done it in a while, or you have a new team member, or even just like a little reminder for people who do it all the time.

Peter, while you're on that page, one of my favorite questions just got asked in the chat. What does the hand signal mean?

Yeah. Do you wanna explain that?

Yeah.

So the hand, I call it a stoppy hand. It's what keeps tasks from happening at the same time versus one, one at a time. So for example, if maybe we want the team to review the changes and also answer the question, does the owner want to continue with the lease renewal? Maybe we want those to happen simultaneously instead of one after the other. If that were the case, Peter would remove the hand from the task about the changes, but keep the hand for the task about continuing with the lease renewal. And on the user side, when your team is actually working in the process, they would see both of those tasks at the same time. The reason the hand exists is if you log on and you see one process with 30 tasks just like yelling at you. That can be really overwhelming and it also allows for your team to skip around and maybe do things out of sequence. The hand allows the right task to be done at the right time in the correct sequence. Anything you would add to that, Peter?

No, that's perfect.

I think it's one of the most underutilized tools in the system.

I love it. Yeah, it's a good one. Okay. And then I'm just looking at the, the document here. So I think there's a couple things here we want to add under non-renewal. So I'm going to delete this like move-out process thing that we, that we created, and we'll just do, uh, send resident. I'm just going to copy what you already have on your process. Send resident Move out process. And that could be an email like we did before, but for now I'll just leave it as a task. Okay. Okay. And then for tenant tasks, it looks like there's a— it looks like there's a renewal inspection.

There is, yes.

Okay. And just for fun, like, let's, let's actually create a stage for that because that seems like a pretty significant milestone in the process here. Let's call this, um, move. Let's call it renewal inspection. So we'll do, uh, schedule renewal inspection, and then, you know, verify inspection completed. What can happen with this inspection? Like, what are some of the things that could happen if if it's good or if it's bad? Like, why do you do it?

We typically do it mostly to check air filters and smoke detector batteries to make sure that their smoke detectors are still in place. And then, you know, it's— we try to do it every other year. So we don't necessarily do it with every renewal, but every other year unless requested by the owner. And it's really just to make sure that they're taking care of the— you know, just they're taking care of the property. If the results are not good, we obviously reach out to the owner, let them know, and then they can decide at that time that they don't want to renew.

Got it. So there's all kinds of fun stuff you could do here, which we're not going to fully get into, but you could have a custom field of like last renewal, last inspection date that you could track, and that— and you could have some conditional logic that would only trigger this renewal inspection if it had been like a certain length of time since the last renewal inspection. You know, you could also have like a, you know, a custom or a template for the email that goes out to the property owner discussing these issues that may have been found at the renewal inspection. You could have, you know, an example here. Let me just do this one because I think it's really powerful. Let's actually delete this schedule renewal inspection. Let's create an email. Let's move that up here. We're going to call this inspection Renewal email. I'm going to go back to General and I'm going to create another contact role called Tenants. I'm going to select Building and Leases there. And then if we go back here, I'm going to select Tenants. Then I'll go into my email templates. I'll create a new one called, um, Renewal inspection. Subject: Important. Scheduling your renewal inspection. Dear—

I have kind of a general question about LeadSimple. Yeah. When we're sending these emails, like if you're having these emails sent automatically as you move through the steps, are they also available in, in Buildium? Does it show in the communication tab that these emails have been sent?

Peter, you probably know that better than I do.

It does not. Okay.

Yeah. One thing that I like to do, um, for the templates is in the template name, note what kind of person it's supposed to go to if it's going to the owner or to the tenant. Um, cuz when you're just looking at the snapshot, you wanna know where it's supposed to go. Yeah, just like that.

Okay, so we'll save that, we'll select it, and we can click that lightning bolt. And now that email is going to go out automatically as soon as you get to the stage That email will just fire out to those tenants. You don't even have to do anything. So as you can imagine, it saves a lot of time compared to like, you know, whether you're doing it from Buildium, you got to like navigate to the lease page, click communication, pull it up, copy paste some template. Or if you're just doing it in Gmail or whatever, now you got to like track down the tenants' email addresses, make sure they're all on there. That's all going to happen automatically here.

And one thing too, just Nicole, cuz I know you're not as familiar when you're running the process, you'll be able to see a full history of the emails that have been sent, including their responses, as well as whether or not they've read it.

Oh, okay.

So it offers a good like log of what's happened.

Gotcha. Okay. And then Send renewal. Okay. I see a task here that's send new lease slash CIT via DocuSign.

So Nicole, do they get the offer and then they tell you their decision?

Mm-hmm.

They want to do, yeah. So if we wanted to, we could also have that same kind of question of if the tenant wants to renew or not, cuz I know sometimes they're, you know, buying or something like that. So we could have another stage change and a question of are they renewing? And then it could go into a non-renewal stage.

So these are the tenant tasks I found on your worksheet. And then when we're done here, we would want to move to this lease renewal completed stage. And there's a couple of things I want to add still here that I saw. One of them is invoice renewal fee to owner. It's a very important one. Don't want to forget that. And scan to file and destroy.

I have a quick story about lease renewal fees. We had, we implemented LeadSimple, um, a few years ago now, but we had our lease renewal needed updating and we had just not updated it in a while and we started a lease renewal fee. All of our management agreements had it., but our leasing agent had no idea it existed. We missed out on 6 months and thousands of dollars. I, I caught it after we had some staffing changes. It was a hot mess.

Yeah, I do have a question about that, just a general question. Do you ever get pushback on renewal fees? Because people— I will have owners say, well, why should I renew because you're going to charge me? Our renewal fee is $250. He said, you know, if I leave them at the same rental rate, I will still be making more than if I were to pay you $250 to renew the lease. Have you ever had that?

He said that if you left it at the same rate, he'd be making more.

Like, if the rent is really low and we increase it at the standard 4%, the increase that they would make over the course of the year could potentially be less than that $250 that they would have to pay as a renewal fee.

But the— that you would still do a lease renewal, though, even if the rent didn't change.

Mm-hmm. We only charge that if we are increasing rent or signing— that's your problem. So they're saying, you know, well, I can just let my tenant go month to month, not increase the rent, and then I won't have to pay you $250.

Well, there's a couple of issues there. One, if you do that continuously, the property is going to fall further and further behind market rent. Also, in a lot of markets, even a nominal increase on the rent would more than pay for the lease renewal fee. Depends like what your average rents are and how much the increase is. But a lot of properties, like the rents are increasing 5, 6, 8%, you know, is like market. And when the base rent's like $1,900, I'm pretty sure that math works out. I'm not going to like do it live here on the show, but The other thing is like it just has to do with your contract language. Like if that's really true that the, the owner is happy to just let them roll month to month with no rent increase, I'd be like, fine, I don't care, do it. And then I wouldn't charge my lease renewal fee because it's no work for me, right? So I'm okay with that. I really only care about collecting a fee if I'm doing work.

Work. So I was just curious.

Yeah, that's a good, that's a good one though. Yeah, Miranda basically reiterated what I was saying there. She said, we found that if you do not take increases over time, you can create an issue where the tenant cannot leave when faced with a higher rent when it's time for the owner to move on. Yeah, basically you don't want them to fall that far behind what's going on.

That there's been a couple of messages about lease renewals. One thing that we found in my experience, we would have maybe the tenant wanted to go month to month and it actually wasn't the owner's decision. We would enter them into Buildium as if they had a lease end date 12 months from now, but would make a note that they were still at-will. That did two things. It triggered the lease renewal process automatically. So instead of having to put them in a different stage with steps, it just ran like a normal process. But then it also made sure that we weren't missing opportunities to get them up to market rent, even if they wanted to continue month to month. I don't always recommend just using the at-will. Thing in building them because people could sit there for years until January 1st, 2060, um, and it just, it falls off.

Yeah, we have a default date for building them, but we actually have a clause in our management agreement that allows us to charge the lease renewal fee if they go month to month and stay for 12 months. Oh yeah, so if they go month to month, we don't charge it, but if they're still there 12 months later, we do charge it at that time because it's basically the anniversary of it. Yeah, exactly. Um, Sarah had a good question here. She said, we, we already have a renewal process that works great for us. And we want to add some things. We recently created pods, property manager with different properties each and have each group integrated with LeadSimple. Would you use the auto assignment rule to assign each PM as a process owner? Yes, I would. That is the settings I have pulled up here. Um, you can configure all that and it'll work beautifully.

I don't use Pods, so I'm not as familiar with those details, but the short answer is yes, it works wonderful, especially if you maybe have, um, so you would, you would use a property group in LeadSimple. That's how you would make that work even better. Um, and then also, um, it works for maybe if you have an onsite manager and you can assign one property per, per, um, PM. Yeah.

Um, So I showed you at the beginning of the show, the Autopilot settings in LeadSimple. Um, just to touch on that again briefly, there's a couple of things that really take all this to the next level. Um, I showed the ability to sort of create these stages and create the tasks, and there's some automation in there. You know, again, you can reorder these, you can rename them. I really want you to feel like this is not set in stone because it really isn't, especially when you first launch. Um, and you saw as we were going through this today that I went back and changed things. I deleted stuff. I reordered it. I was like, oh wait, I have that wrong. That's all normal, right? I've built a lot of processes and my brain is always thinking about processes and I still forget stuff and I do it wrong and then you got to redo it. That's all normal. I want to totally like demystify and destigmatize this idea that you have to be like a process god to even get started with. You really don't. So just get in there and play with it again, regardless of whether it's LeadSimple or, or a different one. Um, but if you are ready to have some fun, you can go into autopilot and, um, let me pull up my lease renewal, uh, just so we don't have to rebuild the autopilot from scratch here. Um, but imagine the power of knowing that you're never going to miss a lease renewal. Because they all kick off automatically 60 days prior to expiration or 90 days or 120 days prior to expiration. I love that. I love knowing that there's never a chance that my team is going to accidentally miss a lease ending and suddenly the owner's like, why didn't you renew this lease? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So just to show this again, you know, you've got these conditions that you can customize. You know, we just happen to have it run weekly on Mondays, but you could have this run every day. Or you could just batch it by month and you're just like, listen, on the 6th of the month we do all the lease renewals for like the 2, you know, the calendar month that starts to whatever. You get what I'm saying? Like you could, you could batch this in different ways. So I really, I really like that. What have you seen anything fun with this autopilot setting with lease renewals, Madeline?

Yeah, I was just going to add. So like there's kind of 2 different buckets of how people do their leases. There's like they do an exact 12 months or 18 months. And so it's like You have leases that end in the middle of the month as opposed to just like pushing to the 31st. If you have that, I would highly recommend having it run every day. If you have it run to where your leases always end at the end of the month, then you could move towards having it run on like the 1st. Um, cuz then it's, there's a good chance that it's gonna catch everything. Um, I am a little bit skeptical of things like that, and so I always run it just daily just to make sure we're not missing anything.

Yeah. So I'm going to share this. Where do I go to share? I always can never remember.

Go to the settings. Yeah. And then stages and workflows.

Okay. There we go.

There you go. I want to drop a link to this in the chat so that anyone who wants can get a copy of this, um, that we just built here. Um, share. Yes. Copy link. Close. And here it is. So if you click that link, if you're on LeadSimple, um, you should be able to get a copy of this and play with it if you would like to. Um, what else did I want to show? Oh, I wanted to show, so you remember like we looked at that big Excel sheet that, that your newer person is using, Nicole, that's kind of like, this is what I think of as our big Excel sheet, this view here. I can add a filter here and I can see like, oh, show me all the lease renewals that are in this tenant month-to-month stage. Like just show me all of them. Oh, we don't have any in that stage right now. Let's try completed month-to-month. So here's all of the lease renewals that we've ever run in this process that are in the month-to-month stage. We've got 99 of them and I can see when they were started, when they stopped. I can click into any one of these.

This is where you see that communication.

Yeah, you can see all the communication here from our team to the resident and the resident back. Oh, I agree at a 2.5% increase and an offer on a 2-year renewal. Great. So now we have that total history. If someone were to ever come back and say, why did you renew this lease? I never agreed to it. We can say, well, we've got this email right here from Corey. Right. And you can see the history of all the tasks being completed, who completed them. This is like the task overview stage. Um, and they also have this nice process overview that shows, um, like a graphical representation of the stages. Now our stages look a lot different than yours, but it's kind of the same idea.

Peter, everyone's curious about your process and the stages that you actually have built.

Oh, sure. Um, we can hang around if anyone's able to stay after the hour. I'll show that briefly here. So stages. Oh, that's not really what I wanted. Yeah. So we have an automatic lease renewal. Oh, we have an automatic rent increase built into our standard lease. We call it automatic renewal with increase or ARI. But so that's what this stage is. The first thing we do is we automatically email all residents 120 days prior to their lease expiration and we check in with them. We just say, hey, like, what's going on? Are you happy in your residence or anything we could be doing better for you right now? Because we want to resolve any issues before we actually approach them about a renewal. So this is the first thing that happens and it goes out automatically. So Bethany does not have to manually like send this email. It just happens as soon as the lease renewal kicks off every Monday. Then we've got a custom field here about is this like an OSU campus unit, review the tenant's payment history, you know, basically decide if they're criteria for renewal. Then we send an email to the owner about the renewal just basically saying, hey, we're going to renew it at 2.5% unless we hear otherwise from you. Please let us know. And then we have a follow-up email 3 days later if they didn't respond. If that all gets done, we move to checking owner and tenant preferences. Check to see if the owner wants to do a 2-year lease, select a new lease. Here's the automatic renewal with increase email that we send to all residents. You can see like in the subject line we have, you know, upcoming lease renewal, and then the property address gets filled in automatically, and you know, resident first name gets filled in automatically. So it's like really nice. And then depending on what happens here, we're going to either move them to the tenant ARI or the tenant, um, new lease, like if it's time to do a brand new lease with a brand new lease renewal with the resident. So this is what happens if we need to do like a brand new lease with the resident. And this is what happens if it's just an automatic renewal with increase. Um, all this, the normal stuff you'd expect, like updating the lease end date and building them, updating like all of these fee policies, if that's changed, billing the owner our lease renewal fee. And then this goes out to the rental owner automatically. And we have, you know, these little fields that you would fill in. You know, some of this stuff is getting pulled in automatically. Some of it you're, uh, you're doing manually. And then this is what happens if the tenant goes month to month. We have a 15% increase for tenants who go month to month. Uh, and then this is what happens if it's completed and completed month to month. And then if they move out, you can see here, we're automatically starting Or not automatically, but it queues up the lease ending process to start just like I was talking about. So hopefully that helps people who are interested to see.

Awesome. It's so funny working with so many different clients, just the difference in how people like their processes. One thing that I love about LeadSimple is like it comes down to your team and your personality. It's not, um, there's not like a standard way. To build. So some people want like 30 tasks per stage. Other people want, you know, a couple emails and a couple tasks. There's not a wrong way to do it. And I think that's, that's really special.

Yeah. So Nicole, you know, if you decide to sign up with LeadSimple, the way I would run this out is I would go to your team and sort of review what we did today and get them to clean it up. Right. There's like a lot of things that we just glossed over quickly, but yeah, you could pretty quickly get that really tightened up to match more closely what you're actually doing, your email templates, all that fun stuff. Um, and then I would just have your team start using it. Just say, hey, when you go to do a lease renewal, kick off this process and follow it. And every time you find a mistake, tell me and we'll fix it right then. Like reorder this task, fix this typo, change this email template. Um, you want to really involve them in the process and let them kind of start to have fun with it and see the power of it. And you can go in there and do all your user assignments and your due dates. And like, there's a lot of, you know, things that you can add. But the main thing I want to get across to everyone is just go, like launch, start using it, get your team using it. All that stuff is easy to clean up as you go. Um, if you wait for it to be perfect, you're never, you're going to end up not launching and then you're going to feel frustrated. Like you're not getting your money's worth out of the software, whether it's LeadSimple or another, another software.

Yeah, the best way to know what works is to find out what doesn't. And so, you know, it, it might be, and this, this is where team expectations come into play too. It might be that the first time you run the lease renewal, an email goes out and it didn't go to the right person, or, you know, someone got communication that they didn't want to get. All that takes is, you know, an apology email and a thanks for understanding, and you learn and it never happens again. But we would always rather you try it and learn it and break it than have the paralysis of not using it in the first place.

That makes sense. How do you think your team would respond to something like this?

50/50. That's, that's another struggle that we have. You know, we have people that think that their way is the best way and they're getting the job done regardless of how they get there. And then we have, you know, people that are really excited about, you know, doing things as a team and Following processes, it, it's 50/50 for sure.

Yeah. Do you feel like if you got this rolled out, you would feel more confident that none of these were getting skipped and like the ability to see where everything is at in the process?

Yes.

Yeah.

Sorry.

Where's my pet?

I don't know where dog is. Yeah. Where's yours, Madeline? Pet required for this live workshop. No.

And then I feel like there would be something to kind of default back to in terms of accountability. Because, you know, now we're just kind of left to our own devices and hoping that things are getting done.

Yep. Awesome. Any other questions, Nicole, I can help you with while we've got you here?

I don't think so. Thank you for your help.

Yeah, I hope that was valuable and I hope it was valuable to everyone who tuned in. I appreciate everyone. We had well over 100 live viewers for this whole thing, so that's really awesome. That's awesome. Any closing words, Madeline? What I, what I, what I messed up there?

No, I, it's wonderful. I think, you know, there's lease renewals is actually one of my favorite processes to add some automations to. Yeah. That's an entire other call. And there's things that work for some teams and things that don't. If you want to explore that, there's lots of tutorials out there. LeadSimple has some great how-tos. I've got my YouTube channel and then, you know, I'm happy to get on a call with anybody too. I'll put my website in the chat for anybody that wants it, and here, here to add value for sure.

Awesome. We'll pop that link in, Madeline, and, uh, we're gonna wrap it up.

Awesome. Sending right now.

Okay, there it is, myprocessarchitect.com. Thanks everybody.

All right, thank you.

Have a great one. Bye.