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At Avail, we are constantly working to improve the tenant experience. For tenants, the dashboard provides a glanceable view of their rental status. Whether applying for a new rental or checking when their next rent payment is due, their dashboard should always provide up-to-date, useful information.
Users have enough to worry about as they apply to apartments and set up rent payments, and our tenant dashboard was not necessarily making the process easier. It was cluttered with unnecessary information and outdated components, making it more challenging for the user to navigate their own dashboard. Our design team took this as an opportunity to implement components from our design system, as well as to streamline the entire rental application completion process.
Simplifying the Tenant Dashboard Layout
To achieve this, we first simplified the overall layout to reduce visual noise and provide a more streamlined view of your activity. A single column allows users to scan the page more easily while bringing important actions to the top of the page — like application requests or invitations to sign a lease. We also moved the Autopay status directly to the dashboard for more transparency into your current payment method.
Next, we reduced the five actions to complete a rental application into one. This was one of the biggest improvements to the dashboard, as it saves real estate and improves the application process at the same time. The new layout makes it simpler for tenants to access and complete a single rental application, saving them time and effort as they move through the application process.
And because tenants are often accessing their account from their phones, we’ve added small — but useful — enhancements to tie your account into your device, like one-click calling to your landlord.
Building Consistency to Make Renting Easier
At Avail, we’ve been working towards a deeper integration of our design system, and updating the tenant dashboard lets us build on that goal. Users will notice more consistency across elements along with added accessibility for users that need assistive technology in order to use the app.
What’s Next?
This refresh is just the beginning of how we are improving the tenant experience at Avail. We’re dedicated to making more user-friendly changes to our platform, so if there are any changes, adjustments, or issues that you find while using Avail, our product team would love to hear from you. Please send your feedback and suggestions about what we can improve to design@avail.co.
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Next Wednesday, June 22nd, we’re kicking off a series of exciting updates for tenants who use Avail to complete rental applications, sign leases, pay rent online, and create maintenance requests.
The first change that users will notice is an entirely new tenant layout (see screenshot above). This new layout places important account-level information in a menu bar on the left side of the screen. These items should be easily accessible, and now they will be.
Over the coming months, we’ll be making several more updates to benefit our tenants. The changes we have planned are based on our experience working with tens of thousands of tenants over the past three years.
The updates that you can expect from us include:
Faster, Simpler Payments Interface
Paying rent online with Avail is faster and more secure than mailing paper rent checks. The newly designed interface will make it even easier to schedule one-time payments or to set-up automatic rent payments. You’ll still be able to pay rent with a checking account, debit card, or credit card.
Better Bank Account Management
Tenants often want the ability to have multiple bank accounts connected to their Avail accounts. You’ll now be able to add more than one bank account and easily make payments from each bank account you’ve added. Deleting bank accounts will also now be a breeze.
Super-Charged Renter Profile With LinkedIn Integration
In the coming months, we’ll be rolling out a new Avail Renter Profile. This profile will become the one place for tenants to track their rental history and other items that landlords use to evaluate potential tenants.
To eliminate the need for you to manually enter your employment information, we are integrating with LinkedIn so that you can get your employment information with just a few clicks.
Your Avail Renter Profile will provide a detailed record of your rental history. We’ll automatically add the information from leases you sign inside Avail.
Improved Application Sharing Capabilities
The rental market in the United States continues growing faster than ever. The supply of properties isn’t keeping up, which means demand for available units is at record levels.
As the market becomes more competitive, we see tenants frequently apply for more than one rental unit. To help tenants avoid paying multiple application fees, we allow you to share your completed rental application with an unlimited number of landlords for free.
Never again pay multiple application fees. Never again fill out the same form multiple times.
Better Control Over Applications and Personal Data
The ability to share your completed rental application with multiple landlords is great, but being able to revoke access to this personal information is just as important.
Within your Avail account, you’ll be able to easily toggle who has access to your rental application and who does not.
Mobile-optimized Interface
Smartphones and other mobile devices are becoming more important every day. Our new interface is designed to work perfectly from any device – phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop computer.
It’ll now be as easy to pay your rent from your phone as it is to order your Grande Triple No-Whip Mocha from Starbucks.
Cloud-based Move-In/Move-out Checklists
As a tenant, when you’re moving into a new rental unit, it is important to accurately document the condition of the unit before you move in. This helps ensure that you are not penalized for pre-existing damage when you move out.
To help make this process as simple as possible, you’ll now be able to document the move-in condition within your Avail account. If you complete the move-in checklist on your phone, you’ll be able to access your phone’s camera to take pictures of the condition before you move into your new home.
All of this information, including any photos that you take, will be securely stored in the cloud for easy 24/7 access.
When you move out of the rental property, it will be just as easy for you to document the condition of the unit.
By making it easy to document the condition of the rental property before you move-in and after you move-out, we’re putting an end to the he-said-she-said nonsense that occurs with antiquated paper checklists.
Seamlessly Move Between Properties With Greater Lease Tracking
Tenants love living in properties that are managed by Avail landlords. The reason? These landlords utilize technology to make renting easy. Rental applications, leases, and payments are now as simple as a few clicks online.
Many tenants love the experience so much that they promote Avail to their next landlord. In our updated interface, you’ll be able to store all of your rental history and lease documents in one place, making it easier for you to move from property to property. Welcome to renting in the 21st century.
Powerful Maintenance Ticketing and Tracking
When renting a home, it’s frustrating when things break or go wrong. To help you communicate issues to your landlord, we’re making it even easier for you to create maintenance tickets.
If you’re using a smartphone, you’ll be able to access the phone’s camera app to capture photos and videos of the issue.
We’re also making it easier for you to track the status of your open maintenance and repair requests.
Our entire team at Avail is excited to release these new features and functionality for you. We’ve spent countless hours speaking with our tenants to understand their biggest pain points and even more time brainstorming potential solutions.
In the coming months, we’ll be reaching out to let you know of further changes and what other exciting features we’re working on.
If you have any thoughts, feedback, or suggestions on ways that we can continue improving our product for you, please let us know.
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Creating and signing lease agreements is one of the most confusing and expensive parts of being a landlord. There are often different state and local laws that landlords must follow. Rather than navigate these laws themselves, many do-it-yourself landlords hire an attorney that costs hundreds of dollars per hour.
In addition to the confusion and expense, landlords hate the amount of time it takes to track down tenants and co-signers for signatures.
When we launched Avail in 2013, we knew leasing was a pain, but we didn’t expect our digital lease feature to be one of the most popular parts of our landlord software.
Landlords love that they can start with our state-specific templates, edit the terms and send the lease to tenants online. Landlords and tenants are then able to sign the lease electronically to create a legally binding document. Check out 7 reasons why you should sign your lease online.
Now, three years after launching our online leasing, and armed with feedback from more than 20,000 landlords, we’ve decided it’s time to make some important updates to our leasing process.
Start With State-Specific Templates
Residential leases, unlike a lot of contracts, are relatively straightforward. In simple terms, the tenants agree to pay a certain amount to use the landlord’s property for a set period of time. To help you avoid having to re-write the same standard terms and rules that already exist, we had a real estate attorney create state-specific lease templates for our landlords to use.
The next time that you create a lease with Avail, our system will automatically pick the right template based on what state your rental unit is located in. These templates have been saving landlords thousands of dollars since 2013.
Step-by-Step Leasing Wizard
Creating a lease contract can be a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be. To make things easier on you, we’ve developed a wizard that guides you through the simple process of creating an electronic lease with Avail.
The wizard breaks the process down into 7 easy, logical steps and asks you simple questions, such as, “What’s the lease start date?” Our high-tech algorithm then takes your plain-English answers and magically translates them into complex legal syntax that lawyers get paid big bucks to write. We also offer helpful tips along the way.
We also offer an easy way to renew your lease: just click ‘Renew Lease,’ update the lease dates, and then both parties digitally sign.
Better Attachment Functionality
Responsible landlords often add a welcome kit or a new tenant orientation document as lease attachments. With our new attachment uploader, you’ll be able to add anything that you want to help welcome new tenants to your rental property.
Whether you want to upload welcome documents, tips for connecting utilities, or your condo association rules document, you can now easily do so.
Edit the Lease Terms in Preview Mode
After starting with our state-specific lease templates and updating the details by using our leasing wizard, you’re all done, right? Not quite.
Before sending the lease to your tenants to sign, it’s always best to thoroughly read and re-read the lease. If you notice anything in Preview mode that needs changing, you can simply click on the item and make the change. There’s no need to go back into the wizard to make your edits.
Customize Anything in Preview Mode (Pro Feature)
Our state-specific lease templates and pre-written rules are all that you need to create a legally binding lease document for your property. Occasionally, though, landlords want more control over exactly what is in the leases and rules.
To address this, we’re now giving you the ability to edit anything in the lease document. Making this functionality possible took our team countless hours of coding time. Because of how much time and money was invested in creating this, we currently only offer this feature to users on a paid pricing plan.
More Transparency into Signing Status
Want to know exactly what’s going on with the signing process? With our new lease functionality, you now have full transparency into which tenant(s) have created accounts, viewed the lease document, and signed the lease.
New “Draft” Status
One of the things that we’ve learned since 2013 is that landlords are not procrastinators. Many landlords want to get things ready as early as possible. In fact, the other day, I spoke with someone who signed up for our service because they are buying an investment property this summer!
To meet the needs of these overachieving landlords, we’re giving you the ability to create and save a draft lease at anytime. You don’t need to know the specific dates, rent amount, or tenants to get started. The changes that you make to your lease will be saved for you to use whenever you’re ready to finalize things.
Download Print-ready PDFs
An electronic version of your signed lease agreement is permanently saved within your Avail account. You can access this stored document 24/7 from anywhere in the world.
Although the electronic copy exists, many owners still like the sense of security that comes with printing a hard copy of the executed lease document. As soon as the lease is finalized, you’ll be able to easily print a PDF version of the lease.
Upload New Documents Anytime (Even During the Lease)
Landlords who use Avail are some of the most organized people I’ve come across. I’m sure there’s a lot of overlap between our users and customers of the Container Store. To help keep all of your documents together, we let you upload new attachment documents to your lease at anytime, even after the lease has been finalized.
Landlords are already using this capability to upload tenants’ proof of renters insurance and to upload PDFs of late-rent notices.
Improved Tenant Messaging
Frequent, open communication between landlords and tenants is the easiest path to a great renting relationship. To make this easier on you, the landlord, we’re now giving you the ability to send messages to your tenants from within the leasing interface.
You can send messages to your tenants to request signatures, remind them about pending leases, or send updates on the lease status. We’re certain that your prospective tenants will appreciate these updates from you, and it will start your renting relationship off on the right foot.
Visual Design Improvements
If you’ve been using Avail for a while, you’ve probably noticed the improvements that we’ve worked on. In November, we introduced an entirely new landlord layout and last month, we introduced an updated rental listings interface.
While most of our efforts go into making our product more useful, we do spend time thinking about how to make the product more visually appealing. We want our product to be a joy for you to use.
Applications to Leasing to Rent Collection, As Easy As Ever
Landlords who use all parts of Avail save the most time and money. A lot of this has to do with how our product is built to seamlessly send information from one step to the next.
For example, you can use Avail to screen prospective tenants with our online rental applications and TransUnion credit and background checks. As soon as tenants complete these reports, they’re available in your account. You can review these, then quickly click ‘Accept’ to start a lease with these tenants. Their names and contact info will automatically be transferred onto the lease.
After everyone signs the lease, the next step is to collect rent payments. You’ve already entered information on the payment schedule, so our system automatically sets up the series of charges that your tenants can pay online with a bank account or credit card.
This new listings interface is one of many upgrades that our team is working on now. At Avail, we empower landlords by giving them access to the tools and knowledge they need to make renting easy.
If you’re a landlord, but not currently using Avail, you can save yourself a lot of time by signing up here. If you have any questions, please let us know.
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