I don’t know a single letting agent who entered the profession to fill out forms. It’s boring. It’s time-consuming. And with ongoing regulatory changes in the private rented sector, there’s more form-filling required than ever before to onboard a new tenant.
The good news is that technology can solve this — not by replacing the human relationships that make great agencies, but by removing the admin that gets in the way of them.
The numbers speak for themselves:
- A 10-branch agency saves over 600 hours per month with automated tenant onboarding.
- A 40-branch agency saves 2,400 hours — the equivalent of 60 weeks of work.
- A 100-branch agency saves 6,000 hours every month — 150 weeks of agent time redirected to revenue generation.
These aren’t theoretical savings. They’re what happens when you stop making agents the integration layer between disconnected systems.
Does technology reduce the human touch?
This is the concern we hear most often from agents considering onboarding technology. The worry is that automating the process creates a colder, more transactional experience for tenants.
The opposite is true. When agents spend four hours manually processing a single tenant onboarding — chasing documents, re-entering data, coordinating between systems — they’re not building relationships. They’re doing data entry.
PropCo’s approach has always been to free up agents’ time so they can do what they’re good at: building trust with landlords and tenants, offering expert guidance, and growing their agency. Better technology creates better jobs, not fewer of them.
The real cost of manual onboarding
Consider a typical agency that onboards 15 tenants a month. At approximately 4 hours per tenant, that’s 60 hours of admin per branch per month. For a single-branch agency that’s already significant. Scale that across multiple branches, and the cost becomes substantial:
- 10 branches: 600 hours lost per month — nearly four months of a full-time agent’s time.
- 40 branches: 2,400 hours — sixty weeks of work that could be spent on viewings, listings and relationships.
- 100 branches: 6,000 hours every month — 150 weeks redirected to revenue generation.
And that’s before accounting for the cost of human error — incorrect data entry, missed documents, compliance gaps — which become increasingly likely when agents are processing high volumes of paperwork manually.
Why fragmented tech makes the problem worse
Many agencies have tried to solve this problem piecemeal — a referencing tool here, an e-signature platform there, a separate portal for maintenance. The result is that agents unwittingly become their own CTOs, managing multiple logins, re-entering data between systems and plugging the gaps where integrations don’t quite connect.
Errors don’t just occur within systems — they occur at the joins between them. Every time data is transferred from one platform to another, there’s an opportunity for something to go wrong.
A fully integrated platform eliminates those joins entirely. The landlord, agent and tenant all contribute to the same onboarding process, on the same system, with no duplication and no re-entry.
What integrated onboarding actually looks like
With PropCo Onboard, the entire tenant onboarding journey — from application to move-in — happens within one platform. Every person involved contributes their information directly, in context, without anyone else having to re-enter it.
The agent has complete visibility at every stage. Documents are tracked, data is validated at source, and the compliance record is built automatically as the process progresses. What previously took seven days now takes seventy minutes.
The time saved isn’t absorbed by doing more admin — it goes back to the agent to spend on the work that actually grows the business.
Data quality as a competitive advantage
There’s a second benefit to integrated onboarding that’s easy to overlook: data quality. When the person closest to the information enters it directly — the tenant entering their own details, the landlord confirming their preferences — accuracy improves significantly.
PropCo records every action and transaction permanently. That means a landlord who needs years of portfolio records for a tax audit gets them in minutes, not days. It means compliance is demonstrable, not just claimed. And it means the decisions your team makes are based on accurate, current data rather than yesterday’s spreadsheet.
Ready to give your team their time back?
PropCo Onboard is built into the same platform as your lettings, property management and client accounting — no additional integrations, no separate logins, no gaps. Know more.
