Create a Tenant's Portal with Malcolm!

If you're a managing agent, a residential management company, a right to manage company, residents association or something similar Malcolm! is the perfect platform to consolidate all the information and knowledge about your building and digitise and automate all your routine building related tasks.

Using Malcolm! you can quickly set up a web based Tenants Portal. Here's how:

01. Create a new instance of Malcolm!

An instance is a workspace which contains it's own collection of content, design, users and settings. If you manage lots of separate buildings you'll likely want an instance per building. Click here to create your instance - if you aren't yet a Malcolm! user you can register as part of the process.

02. Brand things up

Head over to the Brand section of MyMalcolm (our control panel) where you can customise all sorts of visual elements. Choose the colours and fonts you'd like to use on your portal as well as uploading a logo if your building or development has one. You can also customise the look and feel of emails the portal sends out.

03. Add your own domain (optional)

You can easily set the portal up to use your own choice of domain name, which is a great way for tenants to remember how to access the portal and a great branding opportunity. Find out how to set-up your domain here.

04. Add password protection (optional)

If you want to restrict access to your portal (which is probably a good idea if it contains detailed information about the building) you can password protect your portal with either a simple single password that you can share with your tenants or by using our Auth0 or Memberstack integrations which will let you give everyone their own individual login.

FAQs/Articles are where you can share all the information tenants are likely to need to know. For example:

When are the bins collected?
How do I control the heating in my apartment?
How do communal electricity bills work?
What the emergency contacts for the building?
What do I need to know about subletting my apartment?

See more about creating FAQs/Articles in the video below:

You can keep adding more content over time and be sure to enable our feedback features to hear tenant feedback on the content you add - this can be really insightful and will help you make the content better and better.

06. Use Workflows to digitise common tasks and requests

Think of Workflows as digital forms where you can collect information from your tenants, offer them choices and even take payments using our Stripe and Square integrations.

Use Workflows to create forms for tasks such as:

Reporting a property maintenance issue
Requesting new building keys or an access fob (including taking payment if necessary)
Requesting permission for in unit modifications
Supplying / updating tenant contact details
Notifying the subletting of a unit / apartment

The above are just examples - it's quick and easy to create forms for your building's own unique and exact requirements. We've also many pre-configured templates to choose from too.

Find out more about Workflows in the video below:

07. Automate follow ups

One a tenant has completed a Workflow you can do a number of clever things automatically. These include:

sending the tenant an acknowledgement email so they know you've got their submission
Sending third parties emails containing some or all of the information submitted. These can be triggered when certain criteria are met. A good example would be a property maintenance form - if a tenant reports an issue with (for example) communal lighting you could set up a rule to automatically email the contractor who looks after communal lighting. This means the issue is escalated to the appropriate person straight away 24/7/365 meaning a quicker resolution for all - plus no need to manually send emails.
As well as emails you can also use Integrations to interface with other third party systems or software that you may use. You can put some of all of the data a tenant submits in a Workflows into other third party systems eg Dropbox or Google Sheets (do this via our Zapier or Make integration). You can do cool things like if a tenant reports an urgent issue use our Twilio integration to send an SMS to an on-call team member. Or create a Workflow for new tenants to register and automatically distribute their details to the other software or apps you use.
You can combine emails and integrations and do super useful things like (in our maintenance form example above) sending an email and/or an SMS to a contractor as well as automatically adding the issues into a Google Sheet you have set up to track all maintenance issues and sending a "thanks for reporting this issue" email back to the tenant. You can also - of course - download all submitted data at any time.

Find out more about the power of automations in Malcolm! in the video below:

08. Launch

Now it's time to launch your tenant portal and get some feedback from residents!

Like any online project feedback from real users is key and Malcolm! is full of tools and features that will let you optimise your content and improve the tenant experience going forward. Over time your portal will become better and better as you add more information about the building and details of the processes and policies you use in managing it. As well improving the tenant experience you'll also massively boost your operational efficiency at the same time.

At Malcolm! we're always here to help - in fact wanting to help people and offer great customer service is how we got started in the first place! So if you've any questions or need a hand with anything don't hesitate to get in-touch with our friendly support team. Open a support ticket here.