Property Management Systems – Pick your niche and grow 

There are thousands of Property management systems (PMS) aka real estate management systems/software/solutions. And the reason there are so many is simply because the property market is incredibly rich and diverse. 

There are different geographic areas, different types of property, different types of tenants, different types of property owners, different types of property managers and property management businesses. 

It is an industry of niches. And there are providers out there struggling to supply a one-size-fits-all solution to property management, but you can’t do everything well and you can’t do everything simply and you can’t do everything while supplying an enticing (and true) value proposition to everyone.

This means there are always numerous under-served, unsatisfied market segments looking for a property management system that gets them. That fits their needs.

You’re probably part of one of those segments, part of a niche that available solutions fall short or completely miss to create some value for or at the very least offer some efficiencies to ease the workload.

That deep knowledge of a property management niche is a huge advantage and is the foundation for building a successful PMS that might begin with a theoretically small market, but in practice has no upper bound on growth. 

Let’s start with some background on PMSs.

What Are Property Management Systems?

Property Management Systems are software solutions that automate the various tasks associated with the management of real estate properties.

Depending on their focus (or lack of focus), they can cover areas like property listings, tenant management, rent collection, financial tracking, maintenance scheduling, reporting, and more.

The obvious benefits of Property Management Systems:

The primary purpose of PMSs is to make executing on the often complex processes of property management easier, thus lowering barriers to success and also lowering the level of expertise needed, which provides a secondary benefit of making the filling of property management roles easier. 

Ease of use goes hand-in-hand with efficiency. A good PMS makes the difficult simple and the tiresome painless. A good PMS doesn’t just do this for the back office processes. A good PMS makes all interactions easier and provides a better experience for everyone that has to interact with the PMS, including property owners, tenants, service providers (plumbers, locksmiths, etc), while enhancing the overall experience for property owners and tenants. 

On top of process improvement, a PMS gives stakeholders access to detailed analytics covering every aspect of the processes and transactions it implements. These are the essential numbers for running a property management business and another key reason for adopting a PMS. 

For the PMS platform owner, which could be you, access to anonymised and/or aggregated data provides opportunities for targeting development towards the features analytics reveal your users rely on the most in order to increase market appeal, but it can also provide market insights that are unavailable elsewhere and present a true advantage. 

How Property Management Systems are aggregating new technologies

The first PMS was a ledger – a physical book with pages of properties and related transactions filled out by hand. There were probably some ledger hold-outs up into the 90s, everyone else having moved to PC-based options in the 80s.

The real driver for uptake (and building) of PMSs was the development of payment service integrations, allowing even the smallest player to use a PMS to set up direct debits for tenants. This in turn has driven the development of countless PMSs because venture capital loves nothing better than business models that place themselves in the middle of a high number of financial transactions that they can take a 3%-5% fee from.

Today PMSs are SaaS – Software as a Service – running in the cloud, with a website designed to be mobile-first, with market leaders also offering native IOS and Android apps.

But a PMS can also extend beyond the browser, the desktop and the phone, depending on the niche. The proliferation of cheap microcontrollers with sensors plus connectivity via WiFi or 4/5G has created a revolution. It’s the Internet of Things (IoT) and it makes detailed property monitoring for maintenance and security cheap and accessible. For PMSs with feature sets that lean towards maintaining properties, integration with IoT networks, providing automated monitoring as well as analytics to generate predictive maintenance schedules and live feeds of property condition is a must-have.   

And we can’t talk about technology without mentioning AI and its use in PMSs. This can be generative AI (think ChatGPT) for helping with the production of property listings and other written communication, and customer service in the form of chatbots. It can also be Predictive AI that ingests the data collected by your PMS and generates maintenance schedules, flags tenant issues early, etc. You can read more about Generative and Predictive AI in this article.  

Picking the niche for your Property Management System

Ideally you should already have the niche for your PMS picked out. The best niche is the one that you have experience in and understand the challenges and pain points that participants (like yourself) need to be addressed firsthand.

If you’re not sure about a niche, below is a list to get you thinking. We’ll leave it up to you to decide if you want to target a market of mice, rabbits, deer or elephants (there are no flies in real estate). 

What features your PMS will need depends on your niche. What features the MVP version of your PMS will launch with depends on how well you understand your chosen market.

• Residential Real Estate
  • Single-Family Homes
  • Apartments/Units
  • Luxury Homes
• Commercial Real Estate
  • Office Spaces
    • High-rise Office Buildings
    • Suburban Office Parks
    • Co-working Spaces
    • Executive Suites
  • Retail Properties
    • Shopping Centers
    • Strip Malls
    • Standalone Retail Stores
  • Industrial Properties
    • Warehouses
    • Distribution Centers
    • Manufacturing Facilities
    • Flex Spaces
  • Mixed-Use Developments
  • Hotels and Hospitality
    • Full-Service Hotels
    • Limited-Service Hotels
    • Resorts
    • Boutique Hotels
    • Serviced Apartments
    • Short-term rentals (AirBnB, etc)
  • Parking Facilities
  • Data Centers
• Rural and Agricultural Real Estate
  • Farms
  • Ranches
  • Lifestyle Properties
• Specialized Real Estate
  • Student Accommodation
    • On-campus Dormitories
    • Off-campus Student Housing
    • Purpose-Built Student Accommodation (PBSA)
  • Retirement Villages
    • Independent Living Communities
    • Assisted Living Facilities
    • Nursing Homes
    • Continuing Care Retirement Communities (CCRCs)
  • Healthcare Facilities
    • Hospitals
    • Medical Office Buildings
    • Outpatient Clinics
    • Rehabilitation Centers
    • Urgent Care Centers
  • Self-Storage Facilities
  • Recreational Properties
    • Caravan parks
    • Sports Complexes
    • Fitness Centers
  • Educational Facilities
    • Schools
    • Colleges and Universities
    • Training Centers
• Property Development
  • Residential Developments
  • Commercial Developments
  • Land Subdivision
• Real Estate Investment
  • Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs)
  • Property Funds

Build your own Property Management System or tailor an existing one?

PMSs have been around long enough that there are not only software development houses with deep expertise in building them, but there are also software houses that offer white label solutions – prebuilt software you can check off the features you want and slap your branding on and launch. 

This makes one of your first and biggest decisions on launching a PMS a choice between build or buy. 

Build gives you control. That control gives you a straightforward path towards growth.

Buy gives you speed, but very little control. There are a multitude of options for how you purchase and run a white label PMS. They all have trade-offs and we don’t have the space to go through them. If you take this path, do your homework to ensure you have clear lines for growth, preferably via access to the PMS’s source code (which you hope is high quality) and accessible expertise to keep it running and build upon it.

Build vs buy is a chicken and egg gamble. 

Does buying and launching quickly let you confirm the market is there or will the market be uninterested in your copycat PMS?     

Does building let you launch with a product tailored to your market months later or do you burn cash and time to release a new PMS the market is uninterested in? (Hint: you can reduce the chances of the second option by checking out the LEAN canvas methodology and how to find product-market fit.)

But business is always a gamble, but it’s one of the few gambles where working hard and working smart can vastly improve your odds.

Property Management Systems are software and software is malleable

That sounds deep. But what it means is that once your PMS is successfully servicing its niche you are now the proud owner of a machine that makes money and that machine takes very little (comparative) effort to retarget or to expand.

The hard part is finding and landing that first niche. Once you grind out success in a niche you have in place 80+% of what you need to take over the next niche. Or to grow up out of your niche into the broader market – from regional unit rentals to regional residential rentals to nationwide residential rentals. Why not go global from there?  

Pick your Property Management System developer and grow

This is the pitch. SoftwareSeni gets proptech. We build proptech. We’ve been building software based businesses in the real estate market for nearly 15 years. We build businesses from the ground up and for many of them we also manage the backend, keeping them running and secure and profitable.  

We’ve been helping businesses start and grow for long enough that we don’t just have the technical knowledge you need, we’ve got the business experience to help you gain the maximum leverage from our technical knowledge.

If you have a niche you want to build a PMS for, or just want to talk proptech, get in touch with us.