Terri Ramsey Beavers In the current digital scenario, ERP systems have become one of the best and most reliable options in the real estate rental business. A property management ERP system turns out to be a great way to keep clients satisfied and ensure moving cash flow. Earlier, what Property Managers or owners used to manage manually now can be handled through automated methods using ERP for real estate.
There are some exciting stats about rental income in the United States. The Property management industry generates roughly $88.4 billion in revenue annually. Since real estate rentals are generating that much money, this has made several software companies come up and help landlords, investors, and property managers stay organized for rent collection, communication, and management. A reliable software system allows you to help attract, screen, and manage tenants, respond to their maintenance requests and justify operating expenses and revenue.
Considering the benefits of ERP systems for property management, many businesses have migrated their operation to one of these automated platforms, identifying new opportunities, having more defined business processes, and making better decisions. This shift has made realtors and property managers more productive and their clients happier than before.
Top Challenges Property Managers Struggle With
Global lockdown and COVID 19 situation made it difficult for real estate rental businesses to maintain profitability, creating uncertainty in the business ecosystem. Still, many property rentals and service managers survived testing and grew their business by identifying the core issues and finding sustainable solutions. Here are some major challenges that property managers still experience at some point in time.
- Service and Payment Issues: It is difficult to manually handle financial records. Manual handling can result in errors. Not only does payment agreement monitoring become sustained, but there is also a risk of missing financial transaction tracks and records of services you provided to the clients. Losing such vital data would lead to exploiting real estate resources that could have otherwise brought profit to the business.
- Unplanned Maintenance: Maintenance is an ongoing process in the rental industry and can be easily handled when planned. However, possibilities of unplanned maintenance always exist. And the chances of such unplanned maintenance and incident management situations may increase if you don’t conduct periodic checks. Furthermore, many renting service providers don’t have any request tracking system to ensure timely resolutions.
- Poor Communication: There is a need for frequent communication with clients and tenants in the real estate rental and services business. They may submit maintenance and other requests regularly. If you misplace these details due to poor communication, it can create confusion and could result in rental payments going unpaid, service requests going unattained, and renewal deadlines getting missed. This will leave you wondering about rental payments and services request status. Ultimately, these things could significantly impact the bottom line of your business.
According to a Gartner’s Report, “By 2022, cloud ERP will be the most preferred option for more than 75% of midsize companies and more than 40% of large enterprises aiming to transform their monolithic legacy ERP estate.”
This means your competitors might have already started deploying advanced ERP solutions for their real estate business or maybe evaluating the options they have right now.
How To Add Value To Your Rental & Service Business With ERP Management Tool?
To run a real estate rental and services business nicely, continually adapting to the changing business environment is necessary. Automation is the solution to most of the problems that property managers or owners struggle with on a daily basis. The right ERP for Real Estate helps you achieve business productivity through the below-mentioned features and capabilities.
Centralized Data: Property Managers and business owners have to deal with various clients at the same time. With an ERP system, it becomes easy to manage multiple ventures through a single platform which allows storing and accessing the data in one place, making it easier to maintain records, manage them and monitor information across different business operations.
Better Collaboration: Developing effective communication among on-site and remote teams is essential to ensure the smooth functioning of the real estate business. ERP system bridges the communication gap between your teams from different departments. The system dashboard can update and share information and improve collaboration to avoid confusion and delays.
Operational Proficiency: Automation is the key, and the ERP system automates all business operations, eliminating repetitive processes such as notifying tenants, collecting payments, scheduling maintenance, handling repairs, and performing other tasks. No more manual tracking of the data and human errors. This way, a business can better use resources and improve overall business productivity.
Data-Driven Decision Making: Decisions using a data-driven approach are more accurate and effective. This shows that your business data is securely stored while allowing you to access them in real-time. Also, getting deeper insights into asset portfolio, cash flow, maintenance work, tenant agreement, invoices, and other details is easy. With such crucial information, you can make timely and accurate decisions.
Find the Best Rental ERP Solution for Your Business
Not all ERP system systems for property management are designed to cater to different real estate needs. While some of them may not be integrated with all required modules, others may contain many functionalities you might not need. Therefore, choose software wisely so that it can make a positive contribution to improving your business operations.