Thank you Vitaliy, I knew there had to be a simpler solution!
I would like to suggest adding an additional function signature to the documentation. Now it mentions
SetProperty[{obj, itemspec}, name -> value]
only. It would be helpful to also list
SetProperty[{obj, itemspec}, {name1 -> value1, name2 -> value2, ...}]
below it, to make this easier to find.
