Online Property Management Software for Landlords
Our online property management system provides features to cover all the key areas of property management. It's specifically designed for landlords, and suitable for managing 1, 10, or a 100 or more properties.
The Traditional Approach
Many landlords manage their property investments like this, with a lot of paper and a lot of spreadsheets. The downsides to this are that it can be hard to find key information quickly, it's not always easy to get an overview of the portfolio, it's a little too easy to miss something, it's difficult to work as teams (especially remotely), and then there's the risk of fire, and PC theft.
A Better Way
Imagine if you had one place where you, and other people (partner, assistant, letting agent, accountant, bookkeeper), could put all key information relating to your portfolio: property details, tenant details, mortgages, repairs, keys, valuations, meter reading, etc, where it was all easily accessible, with a wide selection of reports, and where you could keep scanned copies of important documents. Our goal with Juicy Property is to provide that to you - to save you time, help you keep financial control, and reduce risks.
Financial Control
Track Rental Income
Logs due rents, and track received rents as they arrive. Tenants in arrears are easily identifiable, and it’s easy to see the total amount owed by each tenant. You do not need to be an accountant or a bookkeeper to use – it provides the core functionality that a landlord needs, but no more, to keep it easy and quick to use. You can use it to track everything, just rents, or use it to collect information your accountant or bookkeeper then uses.
Rent Statements
Run statements in the system, or download them into Excel so they can be sent to tenants to ensure they understand the level of their arrears. Statements can also be used in eviction proceedings. Creating a tenant statement is very quick and easy, saving time, and increasing the chances of the tenant paying, or achieving success in a possession hearing.
Track Costs in Detail
Don’t underestimate the costs of running a property. With the Juicy system you can enter supplier invoices as they’re received, run a report to see which suppliers need paying, or another report to see cost summaries over time, across the portfolio, per-property, or by expense-type. How much did you spend on repairs last month?
Portfolio Rent & Expense Reporting
As well as reporting on income and expenses, you can view both in one report, giving a very clear picture of actual portfolio profitability, including all income and expenses. This report helps identify areas where costs have increased, and provides a clear picture of how income and expenses work together to produce a profit or a loss. Reports are automatically split across portfolios, giving insight into each, and the whole.
Property Cash Flow Summary
It’s important to identify which properties in the portfolio generate the profit, and those that are making little or no money, or even worse, losing money. Sometimes removing properties from a portfolio can be a smart move, but first you need to know which are performing. Once you have entered key information into the Juicy system with the click of a mouse you can generate a report to look at the typical gross cash flow generated by each property (and the portfolio as a whole) by subtracting these key costs from the rental income.
Export Transactions
All transactions in the Juicy system can be very easily exported into either Microsoft Excel or CSV, which can be imported into a wide variety of other programs. Your data is yours, and we make it very easy to download it.
Debt, Value and Equity
Manage Mortgage Debt
The extensive mortgage and debt-tracking features in the application mean that you can easily track one or several mortgages on each property. Enter all the critical details relating to each loan, associate it with each property and then run reports by property, by lender, or across the entire portfolio. It not only tracks the balance and rate, but also the terms, type of loan, redemption penalty & expiry date, all of which can easily be reported on. The system keeps a history of redeemed debt, and can handle any number of loans secured on a property (e.g. a second charge or some form of retained equity, charge or restriction).
Planning Refinancing
When a mortgage drops off a fixed or discounted rate, the interest costs can be very high, and if the property is to be refinanced, it needs doing at the right time to keep those extra interest costs down. When you enter all your mortgage details that includes the date the rate changes, and reporting identifies how many days remain before the rate changes, making it easy to plan ahead, and save money.
Track Valuations
There are many ways to ascertain value of a property – your lender may do a “desktop valuation” using estimation software, a surveyor may visit the property and do their own valuation, or you may perform your own valuation using comparables. All of these can be stored in the system, providing a valuation history over time, and giving an up-to date estimate of value that can be used to monitor portfolio performance. (We are not a member of the RICS, we are a member of ARLA).
Values, Equity & Debt
The Juicy system makes it easy to report on valuations, debt, and equity, either for a specific property or across the entire portfolio. As well as equity, it automatically calculates other metrics like loan to value, yield on debt, yield on purchase price, yield on value, capital appreciation, and debt with each lender. All calculations are accessible through ready-made reports and charts – no need to spend hours poring over Excel (but if you want to, you can export the data and go for it!).
Track Development Potential
As a property investor or landlord it is important to add value to the property wherever possible, as Sarah Beeney regularly reminds us. In order to do this it is valuable to consider, for each property, what forms of value can be added. A loft conversion? Build to the rear? Build to the side? Dig into the basement? You can easily specify what development potential may exist, and the portfolio development potential report quickly identifies where potential may lie. This feature also acts as a useful checklist for the different forms of value that can be added.
Effective Tenant Management
Manage Tenancies
Once a tenancy is set up, it’s easy to manage, right? Until something happens... tenant doesn’t pay, tenant wants to leave, rent needs to be increased, etc. Like any business a landlord should know what contracts are in place with customers, the terms of those contracts, renewal dates, income etc. The Juicy system provides a secure place to easily store details of the key aspects of a tenancy including start date, length of fixed-term, original rent, current (if raised), who the tenants are, contact details for all tenants, whether the tenancy is currently fixed or period, rent review date, whether tenants are professional or on benefits, payment frequency, and a scanned copy of the signed agreement. No more hunting through paperwork to clarify tenancy details – keep it all in one place. There is an in-built note-taking facility so all telephone and email conversations with tenants can be logged, to keep an accurate history of the events occurring during the tenancy.
Manage Tenancy Deposits
Since the arrival of the Housing Act 2004 all landlords are under a legal obligation to protect tenant’s deposits, or face stiff legal and financial penalties. With the Juicy system you can easily track the status of all deposits, from having taken the deposit but not registered it, to having repaid it in full or in part. You can also clearly mark the deposit amount, when it was registered, in which scheme, and what the reference is.
Regular Rent Reviews
It’s easy to forget to do a rent review each year, and just as easy to miss when a tenancy’s fixed-term comes to an end. But with our system it’s simple, all tenancies show whether they’re in the fixed or periodic phase, and rent review dates are maintained, and a report clearly shows which review are due. By doing regular rental valuations on your properties, you can also easily highlight properties where the rent being charged is under market rent.
Portfolio Tenancy Overview
You can easily run reports to get a view across the entire portfolio. The tenancy summary report shows all tenancies, including those that will start soon, those that are in the fixed term, those in the periodic phase, those that are ending soon (where the tenant has given notice), and tenancies that have ended. To check on the status of a tenancy there’s no need to rifle through paperwork – you just open up the tenancy, and can see at a glance its status.
Who Are Your Tenants?
What are their phone numbers? Do you have their email addresses? What about their National Insurance number? Do you know which are on state benefits? Do they have pets? Do you know their dates of birth? All of this information is easy to get, especially if you have somewhere to store it all where it’s organised and easily accessible. And remember, all it takes is to not have that key piece of information like a date of birth or National Insurance number and you may find recovering arrears much more difficult later.
Council Information
Potential tenants will want to know how much the council tax is, and when waste and recycling is collected, and where from. This is easy to track in the system so it can be proactively provided to tenants.
Repairs and Maintenance
Simple Repair and Maintenance Management
It's easy to underestimate what's involved in managing a repair job, and when several are in progress at the same time it can tax anyone's abilities. Our system makes it easy. When a repair or a maintenance job needs doing, just open a new case to track it. The case has its own unique number and description, and you can add notes/emails to it, as well as track when it started, when it finished, who the tenant contact is, who the supplier is, and exactly what work needs doing. You can even log a series of quotes from different named suppliers to make sure you get the best price for the work.
You can easily log a repair in the system (we call them cases), and specify which property the repair relates to, who the tenant contact is, what the estimated repair cost is, and most importantly the status of the work – are we waiting on the supplier to quote, to finish the work? It’s easy to add note to the repair, so everything is in one place, making it much easier to see what active repair jobs there are, and what their status is.
Track Job Quotes
Landlords know that keeping costs down is important, and that ensuring that necessary repairs and maintenance are performed quickly and effectively maintains a good relationship with tenants. To do this we need to ensure we’re using the right suppliers, and in particular getting the right price. When a repair needs doing and it’s likely to cost more than a certain amount, we’ll typically get a few quotes. You can easily enter these quotes into the system, to track who has quoted, how much, and any notes, for example when they can do the work. This easy way of tracking quotes means we can save time, but also keep costs down.
Repairs & Maintenance – Portfolio Overview
All repair and maintenance jobs across the portfolio can be reported on, so it’s easy to see at a glance what repairs are active, which have been complete, which need attention in future, and also see what types of repair are most common.
Track Future Maintenance
As well as tracking repairs performed on an as-needed basis, properties also need other work doing, either maintenance or ongoing improvements. For example a lender’s surveyor may have required that a property has certain work doing to it within a certain time period, or you may just wish to make a note that a property needs double-glazing fitted at some point. All of these projects can easily be added to a property and managed – there’s no need to remember them all any more.
Construction
It’s important to track information about a property’s construction. When it comes time to remortgage knowing whether it’s a standard construction is vital, and providing construction information to lender efficiently will make remortgaging simpler. You can also track flat roofs, which properties have them, so risks, maintenance, and insurance can be managed.
Efficient Portfolio Control
From Purchase to Sale
Use the Juicy system to manage all your properties from considering purchasing, dealing with vendors, through to making an offer, buying, owning, renting, and then selling. You can even track properties you have taken options on. Juicy charges no fees for storing details of properties you may buy, or have sold – this facility is included for free.
Track Purchase & Sale Transactions
Easily track the details of the purchase and sale of a property – purchase price, sale price, law firm, broker, exchange and completion dates, estate agent’s details, and agreed fees, and the location of the deeds. Reduce your reliance on paper files and keep the key information easily accessible. Paper files are slow, take up space, are at risk of fire, and impossible to access if you’re away from the office. Store details of properties you have or are considering buying, with details of vendor, their contact details, and notes of calls and emails. Full support for buying, trading, and letting property.
Manage Options & Lease Options
Many investors take options on properties, where they buy the option (but not the obligation) to purchase a property. Often this is used with land, but often with buildings, and it is commonly combined with a lease (tenancy agreement), as a “lease option”. You can track the key details of options in the system, ensuring all key information is easily accessible. A copy of the option agreement can be attached to the property’s records.
Group Property in Portfolios
You can easily group properties in portfolios. For some this will split residential from from commercial, for others it will split Mr Smith’s properties from those owned by Mr AND Mrs Smith, for others it might split properties in a trust, from those not in a trust, or UK properties from non-UK properties. Many key reports split the results by portfolio, making this simple facility to group properties very powerful.
Portfolio Status Summary
Our unique portfolio summary is a single page that provides a view of all properties owned, with a traffic-light indicator to show status for gas safety, electrical safety, buildings insurance, arrears, occupancy, energy performance certificate, carbon monoxide safety, and fire safety. This invaluable report gives a simple summary of all the key risks across your portfolio, so you can focus your attention.
Track Property Facilities
With one or two investment properties a landlord obviously knows exactly what facilities are available, but for larger portfolios or where properties are not near where the landlord lives, it needs tracking and managing. How many bedrooms? Is there a garage? Where is it? What rooms are there? What appliances are provided? What kind of heating system is there? Is it double-glazed? A property’s facilities rarely change, so once they’re in the system there’s a central, reliable record of what the property provides, which is particularly useful where more than one person is managing them.
Roof-Puncture Location Map
You’ll find that most Internet mapping places the pointer for the location of a property in the middle of the postcode area, which may only be near the property. The Juicy system is different – you can much more accurately specify the property’s location, so it is very clear from the map where the property is.
Quick Links
When you look at one of your properties in Juicy there is a wide selection of useful links taking you directly into your favourite property web sites. For example there’s a link to Rightmove Comparables that opens up Rightmove on the page to search for comparable properties in the postcode your property is in, and making it easy to keep an eye on the local property market.
Community Supplier Directory
There is a directory of suppliers in the system that is shared across all our customers. So for example if you search for “british gas”, you’ll see there is already an entry for British Gas as other customers have already entered their details, so in the account you’ll find their phone number, web site, and postal address. Anyone can edit the account details on a public supplier’s account, to ensure they’re up to date. When you create a new supplier account, you can choose whether to keep it private to yourself, or whether to add it to the public directory. As a community of landlords we become more efficient by working together.
Teamwork
Team Support
If your properties are managed by more than one person, you can set up additional user accounts, so you can all benefit from your own username and password:
- Each user has their own “recent items” list, making it easy to see items recently viewed
- Each user can have Tasks assigned to them under their own name
- As each person makes changes, the footprints show their name on the entry they changed
- Team members at different locations can all access the same information
Accountant/Bookkeeper Access
If you use an accountant or bookkeeper to handle accounting, you can easily give them access to the system, to either do the bookkeeping in the Juicy system, or supplement an existing accounting system (for example Sage or QuickBooks) with property related details, for example tenancy dates and tenant names.
Letting Agent Access
Provide access to your letting agent, so they can update property details for you, or print off key information to provide to the agent to save time and avoid filling in lengthy agent instruction forms.
Task Management & Reminders
You can easily add tasks to the system so that you know what needs doing when. You can have as many user accounts as you like (optional, for a small monthly fee) and even allocate tasks between different people, so our system is supportive of portfolios being managed by more than one person.
Reduce Risks & Manage Safety
Manage Fire Risks
Government legislation relating to fire safety is strengthening and there is a clear responsibility on landlords to do a fire risk assessment and put appropriate measures in place to protect occupants should a fire break out. Use Juicy to mark a property with information about what fire fighting equipment is present (fire blanket, fire extinguisher), and document the type of fire detection system installed (none, battery-powered alarms, mains-powered alarms, etc). Reporting makes it easy to identify properties that need additional protection installed.
Gas Safety & Supply
As landlords we all want to keep our tenants safe and make sure we comply with the law and avoid penalties. It's easy to remember to perform the gas check every year with one property, but with more it can become more challenging. Our system makes it child's play, as you enter the current gas safety certificate into the system, and the reports clearly flag up those that will shortly need a new certificate using traffic-light indicators. The record of each certificate includes the date it was performed, whether the boiler was serviced, which approved supplier performed the check, and you can attach a scanned copy of the certificate for easy access.
Electricity Safety & Supply
Strangely, even though there is a requirement on a landlord to ensure electrical safety in rental properties, there is not a requirement to hold a certificate. However the reality is that if there is no certificate it is virtually impossible to prove that the landlord has ensured electrical safety. You can enter (and attach copies) of fixed-wiring Periodic Inspection Reports from your friendly electrician, and also, where appropriate, Portable Appliance safety certificates.
In addition to managing the safety of the installation, you can also maintain details of the electricity supplier, the location of the circuit breakers and shut-off, and the location of the electric meter.
Water Supply & Risk Management
Enter details of the water and sewerage suppliers (different in some areas), and most importantly the location of the stop-cock to shut the water off. If a tenant calls about a leaking pipe, they can’t find the stop-cock and you don’t know where it is you have an expensive problem.
Track Appliances
It’s not unknown for tenants to swap high quality appliances for low-quality appliances before they leave a property.
It’s surprisingly easy to miss, but not if you have a simple record of the appliance provided at a property.
These records also mean when an appliance breaks you can quickly see if it’s on the list of ones you provided,
or whether it’s the tenant’s responsibility.
Another reason to track appliances is to ensure when the gas check is done, the engineer has a list of all the
appliances that need checking, and you can give him a list in advance so he knows what to expect.
Manage Insurance
If buildings insurance expires and there is a fire, a structural failure, or a vehicle strikes it, many landlords would be wiped out financially. Insurance for low-cost items isn’t a big deal, but for expensive assets like houses, you must have the insurance in place. It’s quick and easy to enter key information from the insurance certificate, including the policy start date, the end date, and the insurer’s details, then you can attach a copy.
The portfolio insurance report gives a summary of the insurance in place across the portfolio and using simple traffic-light indicators it flags up those where insurance will shortly expire, and those that have no insurance in place.
For completeness you can also store details of additional insurance policies, for example if you have taken out public liability insurance in addition to a freeholder’s buildings policy.
Manage Leasehold Property
Store details for your leasehold properties – the freeholder’s details, the management company, the freeholder’s agent, the start date of the lease, the end date, the unexpired term remaining, and typical figures for ground rent and service charge, to allow estimates of monthly cash-flow. Maintaining a handle on lease lengths in particularly important to ensure the lease does not become too short.
The portfolio leasehold reporting gives a summary of the leases of all leasehold properties so issues can be identified. Properties with shorter leases are clearly identified.
Additional Benefits
Private & Highly-Secure
All the information you enter into the system is completely secure, using the same high-grade encryption used by online banking systems.
All information travelling between you and our system is heavily encrypted using modern encryption.
Information about your portfolio is only accessible through your account using your login details, which you can easily change.
Reliable & Stable
Our software is hosted across multiple, redundant data-centres by a global corporation with more than $1bn in annual revenues. Uptime is typically in excess of 99.999%. The technology partner that hosts our systems also supports business-critical systems for the likes of Merrill Lynch, and Orange UK. We have invested in this infrastructure because we know you need the system to be available at all times.
No Software Installation, CDROMs, Upgrades or Backups Required
Do you enjoy installing and upgrading software? To use our system you do not need to install any software. When new features are made available, they just automagically appear without you needing to muck about with CDs or downloads. Also, because our data is hosted centrally it is automatically, and constantly, backed up, so you do not need to do tedious backups to protect against hard-disc failure, fire & theft. And of course if you get a new PC/Mac/laptop, you just sign in, no need to install anything or waste time with license keys (yuk).
All Data Remains Yours
All the information you enter into the system is yours. If you want to leave our service we will be sad to see you go, but we understand you want your data. For this reason, all of it can be downloaded any time you like using our specially designed export reports, downloading into Excel or CSV files.
Access from a PC, Mac or Smartphone
You can access the system from almost anywhere. At the office, at home, in an Internet cafe, in a hotel, and because our site is standards compliant, you can also access it using mobile smartphone devices like the iPhone, Blackberry, Android, and Nokia phones.
Fully Supported
If you need us, we’re here. We hope the system is easy to use and understand, but when it isn’t, we’re here to help. Although we don’t generally offer telephone support, to keep your costs down, we accept this might sometimes be necessary. All the fields in the system have pop-up help to explain what needs entering in the box, there’s a solutions area containing solutions to common problems, and there’s also a fully-integrated discussion forum.
Vote For New Features
You can submit & vote for improvements to the system – we call it Democratic Software. Within the system is a community area called “Ideas” where you can submit suggestions for improvements to the system. We implement popular ideas from the list. Just sign into the system, click the “Ideas” tab, and tell us what you want!
Because there's no software to install for upgrades, you will see more frequent updates than with installed software.
No Purchase, Set-up, Installation, Training, or Upgrade fees!
We just charge a monthly per-user fee (£15), plus a small monthly payment with each additional property stored in the system (£1 per month per property), costing less than 5p per day.
Can you afford NOT to subscribe and get access to all these great features to save time, reduce risks, and get financial control?
Go to the sign-up page for full pricing.
No Long-term Contract
We want you to continue use our service because it’s valuable to you, not because you’ve signed a long-term contract – so instead, all subscriptions roll month to month, right from the start. You can also upgrade/downgrade your plan as you need to, completely flexibility to suit your needs.
“Juicy Property is brilliant. There’s no software to install and I can keep all the key information about my properties and tenants in one safe place” – Emma Bradford, Landlord
