Commercial Real Estate IT Budget Wish List
Welcome to the holiday season! And if you are running a real estate business, it’s also budget season. Now is the best time to start budgeting for gifts for your business and team members. Here are the top 4 commercial real estate IT budget wish list items to maximize your profits, revenue, and growth.
1. Automation
Valuing your team’s time is one of the best investments you can make. Your team is too smart and too capable to be spending their time on repeatable mundane activities. Everyone knows that it’s an employee’s market. If you want to avoid becoming another statistic in the Great Resignation, you must improve your workplace. Automation frees employees’ time from boring, shallow work and allow them to focus on deep, meaningful, and fulfilling work. Some areas prime for automation include integrating data between systems, checking for data issues and errors, automating reconciliation and month-end reviews, creating client or investor reports, and even building email alerts for various workflows and variances.
2. Analytics
Data is the gasoline that can propel your real estate business forward. Access to intelligent analytics, trends and alerts will help your team make more informed decisions and highlight problem areas before they appear. For example, analytics identify risks in collection trends or if actuals are creeping up on budget numbers. This allows the team to adjust before encountering sleepless nights trying to figure out a solution. As an example, one of our customers uses deep analytics with their properties’ age and income data to maximize rent.
3. Software
Much of the real estate business still runs on Excel. From underwriting to operations to accounting, many firms rely on Excel as an ad-hoc database and application. But this can create late nights of reconciliation, the dreaded #REF errors, and manual processes that eat up a lot of time. There are now hundreds of software options available. Each solution helps to run a specific part of your business. Applications like Yardi and Entrata help with accounting. Juniper Square helps with investor reporting. LoanBoss is a great application to track and manage your loans, while HappyCo makes inspections a walk in the park. If the landscape of applications seems daunting, reach out and we will put you in touch with the best in the business.
4. People
As large as commercial real estate is as an industry, it is still niche when it comes to skill sets. Adding the right 2-3 CRE people can save you the money of 10-25 average team members. From property accounting and underwriting to property management, it is critical to invest in great people if you want to scale. Consider hiring part-time specialty contractors to fill the gaps as you grow. Or consider what makes your company special. Do you have an amazing culture? Or are you an innovation and technology leader?
Interested in learning more? Or just need a helping hand with your commercial real estate IT budget wish list? CRExchange helps firms around the globe execute leading-edge IT strategies for a fraction of the cost using out-of-the-box accelerators.
Commercial Real Estate IT Budget Wish List
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