Version 7.35 of both Landlord’s Property Manager Professional and Regular is now available.

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Directors may incur expenses when on the company’s business. Most travelling expenses involve the cost of running a car.

It used to be a good tax planning idea to have the company own a car and allow the director to use it for both business and private purposes, as the rules for taxing directors on their private use of a company car were very generous.
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A huge issue for professional landlords as they grow their portfolio is staying organised. I believe that an essential step for serious landlords is to invest in property management software.

The problem is that many landlords fail to ask the right questions before purchasing their software.

Becoming a serious investor brings new problems you won’t have experienced before. The answers are provided by clever software. The next challenge is to pick the right solution. Property Portfolio Software’s products are specifically designed to handle the major challenges faced by landlords.

Landlords should ask the following 7 questions:

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We sometimes (very rarely now) get asked the question ‘why don’t you have a trial download of your property management software solutions available?‘

A very good question.

The fact of the matter is that for almost a whole year we allowed our Property Portfolio Software website visitors to download a fully functional 30 day trial version of both our property management software solutions.

Although we were getting a healthy number of download requests, we found that almost 90% of those that requested a download never actually bothered to trial the software. We found this out after running an expensive telemarketing campaign.

In other words, they were not really motivated enough to actually take some time out to test drive our property management software solutions.

Of those who did trial the software, we found that most went on to purchase the software.

We also found that most of our sales came from people who never even bothered trialling the software!

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People in the property business should realise that their tenants are the most important people they deal with, as they are their customers. Looking after tenants correctly determines the cash flow landlords generate from their properties.

Failure to manage tenants correctly will most likely result in the landlord losing money, so it’s vital to remember some essential rules to ensure tenants are paying full market rent every time.

My top five tips for landlords are:

1. Show your tenants that you are a professional landlord: This seems obvious but tenants fear the ‘landlord from hell’. Don’t fall into this category by not addressing property problems immediately, or raising rents without adequate notice. There is nothing better to demonstrate that you are a serious and well organised landlord than providing new tenants with a welcome pack. This will show you have nothing to hide and will contain essential information about the property, plus a question and answer section.

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It’s always a great feeling when customers and other webmasters email you to say how great they believe our property management software solutions are and that they would like to start promoting them to other landlords and investors.

In order to cater for the growing number these enquiries, we have now implemented our Property Portfolio Software – Affiliate Programme through which we have tried to incentivise our customers and other webmasters to pro-actively promote our software by offering generous commissions.

For example if you refer our Landlords Property Manager – Regular solution, you will earn £36.75 in commission. If you refer our Landlords Property Manager – Professional solution, you can earn a whopping £61.75 in commission! All this by just sending the customer to our site with your unique affiliate tracking code.

It takes less than a couple for minutes to join our affiliate programme. To learn more and start earning those affiliate commissions click the link.

The PPS Team are please to announce the addition of an online chat function to our home page at www.propertyportfoliosoftware.co.uk

Online chat allows you to talk to a member of staff in real-time using a text-based interface. It’s just like Instant Messaging. If you have any questions about any of our services, you can discuss it live with a member of the team.

You can access this feature by clicking on the Live Support icon at the top right-hand corner and you can either speak directly to one of our Support staff or leave a message.

With the release of version 7.0 earlier this year, the software was rebranded to Landlord’s Property Manager Professional and Landlord’s Property Manager Regular. The titles Landlord’s Property Tax Manager and Property Portfolio Manager now refer only to version 6.0 and earlier versions. These versions will no longer be supported from 01 July 2008. If you are currently using version 6.0 and have not received or acted upon an email notification about this change, please contact us.

In December 2007 we underwent a re-branding exercise where we hired a software marketing specialist and conducted a major survey with our existing customers.

This week we have been busy upgrading our existing software customers to the newly launched software versions.

What branding has been done?

Well, Landlords Property Tax Manager, which we had been selling since 2003, has now been rebranded to Landlords Property Manager Professional.

And Property Portfolio Software has now been rebranded to Landlords Property Manager Regular.

Why has the software been rebranded?
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Lately I’ve been asking myself what the biggest problem facing Property Investors is. The answer? A growing portfolio!

Why is this? Surely a growing portfolio is a good thing? Well, as your portfolio grows, your paperwork grows with it. I know people who are drowning under paperwork and struggling to keep it organised. I know what that’s like. I used to be one of them. That’s why I got into designing property management software. I started investing back in 1999 and according to the results of our recent analysis of 3 years of customer feedback, nothing much has changed! Paperwork is still the biggest problem for Landlords.

The top 5 concerns were:

1. Increasing paperwork: keeping on top of bills and rental income

2. Staying legal: keeping track of safety certificates and legal documents

3. Good tenant management: making sure they get the information they need

4. Income tax management: knowing what is due when

5. Maintaining a positive cash flow: becoming harder with increasing property prices

In other words, exactly the same problems I had in 1999 and all the same reasons I got into designing property management software!

You can check out the results of my labours here.