If you think you can summarize the role of a property manager in a few lines, then it’s simply impossible. Property Managers perform a wide range of responsibilities such as interaction with tenants, property owners, and employees. In essence, it’s all about communication which needs to be coordinated efficiently and professionalism to keep all parties satisfied. It can help them set up a loyal customer base and enable future growth in a tough market.
Basically, property management isn’t all about real estate. It’s as much about relationships. Property managers have to track all conversation and deals’ status across multiple tenants, landlords, and applicants apart from managing properties themselves. It’s high-urgency, high-touch, and high-stress work. Simple communication between the clients and property managers can become chaotic if handled correctly. Therefore, proper documentation is required to avoid miscommunication.
Human interaction is integral to property management, but its extent decides the margin for errors. Some examples of tasks/processes that are difficult to execute and prone to error just because of complete human intervention include documentation of calls/emails, poor lead management coordination, tenant screening, inspection, and maintenance work orders. There is always a need for a workflow management tool to run in the background and ensure properly integrated workflows.
What Are Disconnected Workflows and How Does It Affect Real Estate Business?
Most real estate businesses opt for different software solutions for handling various property buying, selling, and management tasks. Generally, these tools are disconnected as different teams work on them remotely or at the same location. The data may be redundant and duplicate, resulting in data inconsistency. There will be no direct line-of-sight into the status of a lead or ability to track progress. Using multiple systems means that data may not be available when and where needed. Moreover, there will be no way to manage and measure the performance. For example, any change in construction information data is not automatically updated in other property management systems, creating a huge data gap between the teams.
Some of these mistakes might cost you hundreds of dollars. Moreover, it consumes the time and efforts of your team to correct them as each system is incomplete in itself manually. That’s why most property managers maintain their real estate data in Google sheets. Data is safe in these sheets, but it lacks the information. The case is similar to those using some kind of legacy/old property management software.
Using the given data in the sheets or old software is still missing. In short, there is no clear process workflow defined whether the information needs to be sent to the customers or it should be emailed, or anything else!
The scenario mentioned above can be described as a disconnected workflow. The biggest disadvantage of disconnected teams or the whole system is that if a particular task requires 15 minutes to complete, your team might take 2 hours to complete it.
Disjoined teams, tasks, and tools would definitely cost you in different ways:
Cost To Capital
It will lead to unnecessary higher direct operational and maintenance costs of multiple applications. Also, it will provide you with limited ability to make process enhancements and automation, resulting in high indirect costs.
Cost to Efficiency: Multiple disconnected systems require significant unsystematic collaboration, which may cause huge performance inefficiencies that can burn employee hours to perform routine, mundane tasks.
Cost to business: Compromised highest and best use of resources directly impacting business growth, inconsistent residents and stakeholders’ experience resulting in lesser retentions.
So, is your real estate lending process purpose-built or pieced together? If it is pieced together, are you using an integrated software solution or a different set of tools that are not integrated? Are you reliant on excel and other apps to fill gaps in analysis and calculations in your current processes? Are you handling most of your real estate tasks manually? Is it easily scalable or not? You might come across hundreds of similar questions indicating a deep disconnection in your real estate systems.
How Does REDA Help In Improving Disconnected Workflows?
REDA is a centralized digital system designed to facilitate the setup, implementation, and monitoring of your workflows. Below we have briefly discussed each of these steps you can manage using REDA - The best property management software.
- Setup: REDA offers different tools to help you map out and create workflows from scratch. Pre-made, fully customizable templates are also available to kick start the process.
- Execution: When you have a documented workflow, REDA allows you to easily assign tasks and team up with your employees to get all your jobs done without unnecessary delays.
- Monitoring: With REDA, your employees can see their current and upcoming tasks, while Property Managers can easily make out the “big picture” of workflow progression. REDA also allows Property Managers to leverage real-time data to refine and continuously improve property management processes.
There are several near-term and long-term benefits of incorporating REDA into your business.
Near-Term Benefits of Using REDA
- Property Managers, as well as other responsible people, get notification of new tasks. They will have a centralized view of all existing and upcoming assignments to manage.
- Tasks are consistently appropriately routed throughout the organization.
- Redundant tasks can be easily recognized and automated.
- Incomplete tasks can be followed up on time.
- Property Managers can have better visibility and accountability as they can see the “big picture” of work activity in their team.
Long-Term Benefits of Using REDA
- Easy to scale
- Effective resource allotment
- Leverage real-time performance metrics
- More accountability and transparency
- Process flexibility
- Quick Workflows audit internally for continuous improvement
- Risk mitigation (less human error)
You might need to buy workflow software separately and integrate it into your existing property management system in many property management software solutions. REDA provides in-built open, intelligent workflows that enable your teams, residents, and stakeholders to work the way they want. Distributed teams, both within and outside the organization, will feel like they are part of one cohesive team using REDA. It will help them drive productivity, accelerate innovation and take action anywhere.
Our customizable & flexible communication workflows let you automate more than 75% of communication tasks. REDA workflows & process automation has helped several Property Managers to oversee 150% more properties. This has resulted in direct cost savings of $1.20m per year for only one department. With REDA communication automation, you can save 1 hour/day/employee, which is HUGE! For more information on our product, feel free to contact us!
