Help Scout for Property Management & Real Estate
Handle tenant and client conversations like a team
Whether you’re managing properties or selling them, your team's inboxes are crowded. Billing questions, lease applications, maintenance requests, vendor coordination, showing and inspection dates — it’s a lot.
Help Scout is a ticketing system for property management and real estate companies. It makes it easy to manage communications across all of these functions in one place so your team can meet deadlines and deliver fast responses.
Top property management companies and real estate teams use Help Scout
Help Scout powers over 4 million conversations every month.
Built for growth: 80% of Help Scout customers stay for 4+ years.
Respond to 56% more messages in your first year.
Gmail and Outlook weren’t built for growing portfolios
Using a basic email client is doable in the beginning, but the complexity of property management and real estate operations makes them a bad fit as you take on more tenants or clients.
You end up with:
No order
Billing and leasing questions, showing inquiries, and maintenance requests all land in the same inbox, making it hard to find what you need.
No ownership
No one knows who is responsible for what, leading to duplicate responses, or, even worse, no response at all.
No oversight
If your company promises to respond within 24 hours, how do you know if you’re meeting the deadline? With Gmail and Outlook, you don’t.
No context
Regular email leaves you searching for tenant and client details in old threads and external tools, wasting time and energy.
Help Scout calms inbox chaos for realtors & property managers
Responding to email fast is only half the equation. You also need a tool that simplifies collaboration, never makes you search for context, and keeps track of all your important metrics. Help Scout can do it all.
Every email, organized and accessible
The way property management and real estate companies handle email changes as they grow. Instead of a catch-all inbox, you need a way to break down and track requests by type.
It may seem hard to manage things like urgent maintenance requests and floods of leasing applications through one platform, but Help Scout has the features you need to stay on top of it all.
Organize by inbox or team
Create separate inboxes for different types of contacts like maintenance, leasing, accounting, and vendors or set up teams to make working out of one a snap.
Keep replies consistent
Build a library of saved replies for common scenarios like rent reminders, notices to enter, or showing announcements to ensure responses are accurate and uniform.
Categorize your inbox
Label emails with useful tags like “request type” or “listing platform” to keep track of similar issues.
Record what matters
Use custom fields to capture specific information like the unit number, property address, or tenant ID number associated with each conversation.
Customize your view
Filter your inbox by things like tag, sender, company, status, or wait time to track pressing issues or requests from VIP clients.
Protect your time
Automate busywork like tagging or routing email or tap into AI for help with drafting replies and summarizing long messages.
An inbox with accountability baked in
Collaboration strategies that worked for one or two people won’t work for ten, which can lead to important messages falling through the cracks.
Help Scout ensures that everyone knows what they’re responsible for and communication between team members is seamless. That way, when a building resident or prospective buyer reaches out, they’ll always get a response.
Set clear ownership
Assign conversations to specific people or teams. Everyone in the inbox can see who owns what, so there’s never any confusion.
Avoid stepping on toes
Prevent duplicate work and conflicting replies with clear indications whenever someone is viewing or responding to an email.
Work together
Leave private notes in email threads to document important information or tag in a teammate when you have a question.
Always meet your deadlines
Set service level agreements (SLAs) for all messages or just certain accounts to ensure that you deliver on response time promises.
Stay in the loop
Get browser, email, or mobile notifications when someone assigns you an email, leaves you a note, or when a new reply comes through.
Never forget to respond
Schedule replies to send at a specific date and time or snooze a conversation if you’d rather come back to it later.
Track your team’s performance
Making good business decisions is tough when you can’t see what’s happening. Are contracts being sent on time? Does the team have a balanced workload? Are tenants getting the support they need?
Help Scout’s reporting dashboards let managers use custom filters to keep an eye on developing issues, recognize successes, and gain insights that make it easier to plan ahead.
Monitor staff performance
Track volume, response time, and satisfaction scores by communication channel, or by individual employees and teams.
Spot trends and take action
Filter reports to dial in on emerging issues and identify areas for improvements.
Have full visibility
See everything your team is working on and have confidence that every message will receive an answer.
Never leave anyone hanging
Whether you want to help tenants and prospects help themselves or keep conversations moving on the go, you’ve got options.
Help Center
Create a public knowledge base full of answers to your most common questions and keep those requests out of the inbox. Have internal information you want to keep handy for your team? You can create a private help center too.
AI Agents
Build context-specific AI Agents to answer incoming questions instantly, even when your team isn’t online. Responses are based on sources you choose like your knowledge base or website, so you know the answers are reliable.
Proactive messaging
Trigger website popups and banners to let tenants know about upcoming maintenance, facility updates, or display a contact form. It can also launch a live chat box to encourage prospective buyers to reach out.
Mobile app
Respond to requests from anywhere using your Android or iOS device. Help Scout’s native mobile apps make it easy to read and reply to conversations, leave private notes, and receive notifications on the go.
A setup process that won’t bog you down
Help Scout is powerful, but not overwhelming. Implementation is straightforward so that you can get to work right away.
Onboard with ease
Basic account setup is quick and can be done with minimal tech support.
Learn at your own pace
Once you’ve got your feet wet, check out the help center or drop in for a live class.
Get help when you need it
If you run into a snag, the team is available 24/6 to get you back on track.
Stay in sync with the tools you already use
Help Scout lets you pull in contextual data, use the communication channels that are important to you, and do it all from a centralized location.
Voice and SMS
Manage phone calls and texts directly in Help Scout using tools like Aircall, JustCall, and Haystack.
Messaging and social
Clients and tenants don’t always use email. Connect WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram to manage it right from Help Scout.
Property & real estate apps
Connect property management and real estate platforms using code-free tools like Zapier or Help Scout’s fully documented APIs.
Top customer service guides for real estate & property management
FAQ
Yes. Help Scout works by forwarding your existing email account (ex. maintenance@, leasing, accounting@, etc.) into our system. Once messages land in your Help Scout inbox, you can use all of our features to respond.
All emails sent from Help Scout will still be sent using your existing address. However, once you make the switch, you’ll need to respond exclusively from the Help Scout app.
We partner with a company called Import2, which makes migrating old messages from other services like Gmail, Outlook, Zendesk, and Intercom easy.
Read more about Import2’s service.
Help Scout is an intuitive platform that can usually be set up in a matter of minutes. If you have credentials to the email account that you want to use with Help Scout and are comfortable setting up email forwarding, you may not need any technical support at all.
Reach out to our support team or schedule a demo if you’d like to walk through what the process might look like for your business.
Yes. In Help Scout, anyone with inbox privileges can see which conversations each team member is working on, and anyone whose role allows for reporting access can view dashboards that let you measure performance at the company, team, and individual levels.
In addition, you can set global or company-specific goals around response and resolution time using our service level agreements (SLA) feature. Learn more about SLAs in this blog post.
Yes, it’s possible to manage more than one inbox in Help Scout.
The amount of included inboxes available in your account will depend on your plan, and additional inboxes can be added to any paid plan for $10/inbox per month.
For more information on Help Scout plans, visit our pricing page.
Yes. Help Scout offers several different ways to automatically route conversations. First, we offer workflows — automations that run and perform actions based on if/then criteria. With workflows, you can set up automations that:
Route all emails with keywords like ‘broken’ or ‘fix’ in the subject line or email body directly to the person or team in charge of maintenance requests.
Move all emails from a specific property owner to a specific inbox.
Assign all showing requests to the right agent and then send an automatic response to the sender that someone will be reaching out shortly.
Of course, these are just a few examples. We also have options that focus on evenly distributing your team’s workload:
Round-robin: Email messages are assigned one by one in alphabetical order amongst a set group of individuals or teams.
Load balanced: Email messages are assigned based on the amount of conversations each person in the routing group has, with the person having the lightest workload receiving the next assignment.
While Help Scout doesn’t offer a direct integration with tools like AppFolio and Yardi, we do offer a native integration with Zapier.
Zapier is a platform that lets you connect hundreds of apps with Help Scout so that you can pull in important data and set up automations within your account.
For teams that have development resources, we also offer robust, fully documented APIs that allow you to build whatever you need on top of the Help Scout system. For information about our APIs, visit our developer documentation.
