Our developers are on fire! A new Rentec Pro feature has been rolled out for all Rentec Basic and future Rentec Pro users. You can now automatically dispatch emails to your tenants for important notices. Emails can automatically be sent for the following actions:
- Tenant overdue notices - When your tenant becomes overdue, the system will automatically send an email.
- Recurring charge notices – When a recurring charge (such as a recurring rental charge) shows up on their account, Rentec can automatically send a notice.
- Other charge notices - For any other charges posted to the tenant’s ledger.
- Payment and Credit notices - When a payment is posted to the account send an email notice.
All emails the system sends out are fully customizable via our online html editor. Visit Settings, Email Templates to configure them exactly how you want. You can even incorporate database elements such as the tenant’s name, their balance, or the transaction amount. Sample templates are included for your convenience.
To activate email notifications, edit your tenant via the tenants tab and check Send Email Notifications. To fine tune specifically which notices go out, click the edit button.
As with other Rentec Pro features released lately, all Pro functionality is included with every Rentec Basic membership up until the official release of Rentec Pro. Enjoy these features and please let us know what you think.
Product Update
automated emails, automation, landlord, tenant
We’ve produced a new product demonstration video showing off the features and power of Rentec Direct in just a few minutes. If you haven’t already looked through any of our product demos, this video gives a quick glance into the power, ease, and flexibility of Rentec Direct. The video will quickly go through many of the highly used features of Rentec Direct, including: adding a new property, moving in a tenant, handling and tracking deposits, posting payments and attachments, reports, and settings.
You must have Flash installed to play videos.
Promotional, Site Updates
demo, landlord, overview, product demonstration, property management, video
We’re very pleased to offer two very useful new features. These features are especially exciting because they save landlords money *today*! Setting up a website for advertising properties usually has a monthly expense of at least $20/mo plus the costs for the application or web designer to create the pages which may cost hundreds or more. We’re offering this today for the best price ever, FREE!
A benefit of the transaction attachments and file library in general is it provides landlords a permanent backed up medium for important documents. They will never be lost even if your workstation crashes. This is a service offered by online backup companies for a fee, and again we’re including it FREE!
Here’s more details on these new features.
- Instant Online Advertising - Using Rentec Direct you can now instantly publish your properties online with minimal effort. To use this new feature use these steps: Step 1) Once logged in, edit your vacant property, and (if you wish) add some pictures of the property via the file library. For public pictures, select the checkbox to the right of the file name to use it in your online advertisement. Step 2) Back under the edit property screen, click Property Advertising / Profile and enter the necessary information for the property, and enable the listing with the check box on the bottom. Instantly you have an online ad available for publishing in your local classifieds or other media. Step 3) Your property listing will be available under the domain rtd4.com, for instance, a property listing might look like rtd4.com/123. Your exact listing link will be shown at the bottom of the page. We’ve kept the domain short on purpose to keep your classified ads purchases cheap with fewer characters.
- Per Transaction Attachments - Every time you post an income or expense for a tenant or property you now have the option to add an attachment. Doing so will allow you to upload a file (receipts, invoices, etc) which will be attached to that transaction. When viewing a ledger for a property or tenant, any transactions which have an attachment will have a paperclip icon next to them. Clicking the paperclip will show you the attachment.
These are Pro features we’re giving away to all current and future Rentec Direct customers, until the Pro version is released. Your feedback is appreciated at any time on these, or any other features that we’ve implemented. Try them out and let us know what you think. Please email any comments or suggesstions to support@rentecdirect.com.
Product Update
advertising, attachments, property advertising
Well this is quite off topic for a property management or landlord software type discussion; however, this morning when I noticed that Wordpress 2.7 was available I decided to take the plunge. I’m actually 2 days behind most of the blogger world who all upgraded on the 11th the second 2.7 was released.
For fellow bloggers out there deciding if they want to upgrade or not. I wanted to throw in a few highlights that I’m impressed with.
- I can again upload media from Firefox without having to choose browser upload! This is a major highlight for me, and it may have been fixed in 2.6 releases which I skipped; however, I’m very pleased it’s again simple to upload attachments.
- Fully configurable Dashboard. This is a major improvement. Now when administrators login we can configure the dash to show exactly what we want, where we want it. No more complying with someone else’s idea of “useful layout”.
- Automatic Upgrades. It can’t be stressed enough what a great idea it was to incorporate automatic upgrades into 2.7. Granted, upgrades have always been more-or-less pretty simple; however, with upgrades being 1 click in the future, there will be no excuses for anyone to be behind the curve; or like myself, 2 days late in upgrading.
My review in one word is “wow”. They did a really excellent job with 2.7 and every blogger should indeed take the few minutes to upgrade their installation if they haven’t already.
See full details at the wordpress blog.
Off Topic
blogging, wordpress, wordpress 2.7
We’ve had a lot of signups for our property management software lately, and we wanted to help those wondering who we had in mind when designing Rentec.
We designed Rentec for individual property owners and investors who own and manage their own properties. Rentec direct is designed for you, the investor who may do property investing full time or part time and you own from one to one hundred properties. The owners and designers of Rentec Direct are landlords too and we know what it is like to manage a handful of properties without the need or expense of paying a property management company. We found the need to create Rentec Direct because there was no software application available that fit our needs fully as landlords. As a current or potential landlord yourself, you may have experienced the same.
Rentec is built from the ground up to meet the needs of landlords managing typically between 1 to 100 properties. Very rarely do we see a landlord or small team managing a larger set of properties, so we are able to fine tune the software to work best for this niche.
Another driving factor for us in offering Rentec for free is that generally we feel life has treated us pretty darn good. I personally have the best family one could ask for, great friends, and live in beautiful Southern Oregon. All this came from a lot of hard work, the help and support of our community and country, and perhaps a little luck. One of our goals with Rentec is to give something back. There’s thousands or more man-hours put into developing Rentec Direct, and we give away most of that for free. It’s our way of contributing back to the landlord and investor community and saying Thank You in general.
Rentec Direct is FREE for individual landlords. There’s no risk to try it out, so take it for a spin today.
News, Promotional
free software, gift, giving, giving back, landlord, landlord software, property management, property management software