3 Key Construction Rental Challenges and Their Solutions

The US construction rental equipment industry is amongst the largest in the world. It raked up a total revenue of $53 billion in 2022 alone. 

The sector contributes a crucial percentage to the country’s GDP. It is an understatement to say that it plays an important role in driving up the economy. 

Increasing rental sales brings numerous opportunities for companies in this space. However, it comes with its own set of construction rental challenges. 

Some overarching challenges most construction companies face with their rental operations include: 

• Increase in competition among construction rental companies 
• Inability to accurately track equipment locations 
• Wastage of crucial time consumed in manual processes 
• Unavailability of equipment slowing down construction projects 

Rental companies can easily address all these challenges. The solution is to remove inefficiencies in the current rental operations using intuitive equipment rental software. 

First, let’s visit the challenges construction companies face.

Conventional construction rental challenges

Equipment is the bread and butter for any construction rental business. This is why efficiently tracking and managing the equipment is vital. 

Currently, construction businesses use physical records or spreadsheets to track the movement of their rental equipment. 

These manual processes take up ample time that could be better spent elsewhere. 

The current system can easily result in equipment mismanagement and loss. Additionally, you don’t get immediate access to accurate information timely. 

Even though spreadsheets are an upgrade over physical records, they are still prone to human errors when entering and updating data. 

Also, there’s only so much you can do on spreadsheets, quickly making it obsolete as your business scales. Spreadsheets just don’t offer the scalability powerful construction equipment rental software offers. 

Here are a few disadvantages of using spreadsheets: 

• Lack of collaboration 
• Prone to costly human errors 
• Hard to manage data security 
• Time-consuming data entry 
• Limited functionality 
• Poor scalability 

Let’s dive deeper into the prevalent construction rental challenges:

1. Time-consuming manual processes

In conventional construction and heavy equipment tool rental businesses, their customers rent tools manually. 

For instance, if a construction site requires a brick hammer, a cordless drill, and other equipment, to rent all these items, customers currently have to look up all of these individually, and then rent them out one by one. 

This wastes valuable time for the customer and the rental business which then processes a dozen order requests before the tools land into the customer’s hands. 

Instead, you can easily simplify the entire process if customers can rent out or reserve all the items together in one go. This would make rental operations smoother and faster for all parties involved.

2. Difficulty in locating items

For construction rental businesses, an accurate portrayal of their equipment storage locations looks something like this:

A rental business running on a conventional system fails to cater to these many sublocations. 

For instance, if a customer needs to rent a wheel loader, you may have to spend hours calling up warehouses to locate which one has it and has one that is available to rent. 

To improve equipment visibility, it will help to know where everything is within the overarching ‘HQ’. 

Most conventional construction rental companies have a system to cater to sublocations but it isn’t efficient enough. Employees may have to go through multiple worksheets within a spreadsheet to find which items are available in Warehouse 1. 

This is a mountain of data to rummage when tracking a particular asset. Not to mention, that if your employee forgot to update the rent log, you may have false information regarding the asset’s availability.

3. Lack of control over what employees can view

In a traditional rental management system, all employees can view all the available equipment. It leaves no room for hiding confidential information from irrelevant personnel, malicious employees, and unwanted visitors. 

This intuitively doesn’t make sense. Why should employees be able to view assets that have nothing to do with them? 

An added issue with not restricting data view across employees is that it leads to cluttered data for them to sift through. This takes up too much time and decreases employee productivity. 

If employees can view the entire rental fleet, they can also rent or return anything they want. Or worse yet, they can walk away with whatever they want, without anyone knowing. 

This leaves room for data breaches, security concerns, and even theft and loss of equipment. 

The number of misplaced or lost assets will increase. Moreover, the equipment rental business will spend more to procure newer assets to replace the old ones. 

Ideally, only relevant personnel should be able to view relevant assets. This declutters the displayed information and reduces confusion for all involved. 

Overcoming construction rental challenges with EZRentOut

Now that we know of the challenges inherent in traditional construction rental systems, we can move on to look for solutions that resolve these challenges. 

Dedicated construction and heavy equipment rental software help construction companies automate rental processes. 

Your customers will quickly rent items and get what they need promptly. 

Your employees won’t find it difficult to locate items timely due to higher visibility and accessibility to the right information. 

This will help your rental business decrease the displaced and lost equipment, and wasted work hours. 

Great equipment rental software offers all the above benefits and more. 

It seamlessly integrates with your current workflows to make the switch from manual to digital quick and easy. 

You can easily shift from chasing paper trails and spreadsheets to having accessibility centralized in one dashboard. 

Here are the resolutions to the challenges that certain features of EZRentOut offer to businesses in the construction industry:

1. Use Bundles to rent out quickly and more frequently 

Bundles are perfect for creating a package of items usually rented together. 

Your customers may always rent out these items together since they require everything in it for a particular task. 

For instance, nails and hammers, drills and drill bits; go hand in hand. Bundle them to speed up the renting process. 

This significantly simplifies booking and renting for your customers. 

They won’t have to browse your rental webstore to book or rent items individually. 

Since it’s a bundle, you can also add promotional discounts to frequently rented bundles. 

Supercharged Bundles can also serve as a checklist for your customers’ projects. 

For instance, a DIYer wants to rent a toolkit bundle for a renovation project. With Bundles, they won’t have to worry about missing any item they need for the project. 

The bundle will have a list of all items within it. 

Your customers will easily scan the list and check if it has everything they need. 

This saves time and helps you rent the bundle in a swift one-step process.

2. Use Sublocations to improve item transparency

Sublocations break down locations into their smallest possible units to increase equipment transparency and asset location for your employees.

You can create nested locations (a sublocation within a location). This means Baltimore becomes the parent location, under which you will nest sublocations, such as Head Office 1, Warehouse 1, Rack 2, and so on. This significantly simplifies and speeds up tracking a certain asset within your business. 

You no longer have to run around trying to find a particular item. 

Sublocations in EZRentOut help you precisely identify the exact location of an item, down to the very cabinet or rack. 

It comes in handy when categorizing items. You can create a sublocation for each category. 

Let’s say you keep all your circular saws in the first drawer in Cabinet 5 of Warehouse 2. You can create a sublocation for this drawer. That location will only contain items of a particular category; in this case, circular saws.

3. Use Custom Roles to control employee and user access 

You can restrict the visibility of certain employees by creating Custom Roles in your EZRentOut account. This way, the employees view a decluttered version of the equipment data. 

They only see what is relevant to them, resulting in a more simplistic view of the system. Consequently, it saves them time since they no longer have to go through unnecessary information. 

Restricting access control for your employees also improves equipment utilization because only authorized personnel will see and use the equipment. 

You won’t have to worry about anyone running off with equipment they’re not meant to use. 

You can also ensure that restricted users don’t rent the equipment they aren’t authorized for. This will decrease mishandling and loss of equipment. 

Custom Roles in EZRentOut allow you to restrict user access based on different departments, project groups, locations, and sublocations. 

You can create as many custom roles with as many customized permissions as you wish. Tailor the custom roles to the needs of your construction equipment rental business.

Resolve these challenges head-on

There are numerous challenges in the construction equipment rental industry for businesses that run conventionally. 

Manual processes breed errors and make rental operations inefficient, slow, and messy. 

An automated construction equipment rental software saves you trouble from these inefficiencies. 

It significantly reduces costs, increases efficiency, and results in higher revenue growth that only goes up over time. 

Use Bundles, Sublocations, and Custom Roles in EZRentOut based on your needs. 

Keep your employees productive and your customers happy. 

Happy renting.