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4 Ways Real Estate CTOs are Returning Hours to Their Workforce

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Companies that own, operate, or occupy a significant amount of real estate know how challenging it can be to run their businesses and their facilities both efficiently and effectively. Achieving peak performance from a real estate portfolio, regardless of the company size, requires knowledgeable professionals who understand the business processes, systems, information, imperatives, and constraints of a complex real estate operation.

Many companies struggle to find, train, and retain this type of talent – increasingly so in the areas of technology utilization and end-user support. Quality real estate technology administration and end-user support is essential for realizing strategic goals and operating with maximum efficiency. Outsourcing to a professional services provider can provide access to specialized expertise that may not be available in-house or may be more effective to source externally.

Here are the top 4 actions real estate technology leaders are taking to improve their operational performance, return hours to their internal teams, and gain a competitive edge in the market.

(1) Delegate system administration tasks to an expert professional services provider

Every real estate company requires a dedicated technology team that possesses a deep understanding of the design and functionality of critical applications utilized to operate their business – but this doesn’t necessarily require a robust, internal technology department.

Tapping a reputable services firm to execute daily support tasks allows a company to focus on their core competencies and strategic objectives while leaving the technical administration and support to experts in business process. It also drives lower overhead costs while delivering a larger, one-stop network of qualified and broadly skilled professionals to manage the full gamut of support needs.

Daily support functions that are easily outsourced to a reputable services firm include:

• User provisioning, deprovisioning, and security maintenance
• System or module upgrades and administration
• Report reconciliation and transactional issue resolution
• Scheduled task and automated report generation
• End-user training and process documentation creation

Professional services providers heed emerging trends and technologies, ensuring businesses are always operating with the most current and efficient systems and functionality. By outsourcing routine tasks such as user provisioning, system upgrades, report reconciliation, and audit compliance, internal staff can reallocate their time and focus on priorities with higher intrinsic value that are viewed as more crucial to operational efficiency and revenue generation.

(2) Automate repetitive, high-volume financial and operational tasks

Automated processes can significantly reduce the risk of errors and mistakes while stabilizing anticipated outcomes. By eliminating the need for manual task completion, companies can minimize the risk of human error and improve the accuracy of their data.

Custom-developed Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can execute business processes using routines that replicate the human interaction within an application’s interface – it is designed to behave the same as a full-time resource, but at a much lower cost and incredibly faster pace.

If an existing manual process is high-volume, repetitive in nature, and is prone to error or output variability, it may be a good candidate for automation. Routine functions that lend themselves to automation include:

• Daily bank statement downloads and staging
• Bank reconciliation matching
• Work paper formatting
• New lease entry
• Monthly report pack collation and distribution
• Property tax comparison
• Tenant statement emailing
• Budget extraction and distribution
• Monthly provincial sales tax validating and filing
• CAM & Tax management
• Journal entry audits

RealFoundations has adopted the leading integration platform used by 40% of Fortune 500 companies and five of nine major global banks and financial institutions to provide application integration as a service capability to the real estate industry. Our automation team continues to develop new capabilities for automating many of the manual and repetitive tasks associated with managing real estate while offering custom solutions to meet specific client needs.

(3) Standardize business processes to minimize system disruption

Fluency in technology and business process is a competitive advantage. The knowledge of why an issue occurred, and the process of how to mitigate that issue in the future, empowers and educates end-users on the relationship between data and reporting as well as the procedural workflows of their respective functions.

Standardizing business processes brings:

• Consistency – When processes are standardized, the same set of rules and procedures are followed reducing the likelihood of errors while simplifying the troubleshooting process when they arise.
• Efficiency – Optimizing processes reduces the amount of time and effort required to complete tasks and can make the overall process smoother.
• Scalability – When designed to accommodate growth and expansion, the processes can adapt and evolve without disrupting the system.
• By minimizing system disruption with documented, standardized business processes, real estate companies can harness thoughtful solutions that ensure long-term success, rather than relying on technology workarounds or implementing quick fixes.

50% of support requests RealFoundations’ Application Services team resolves are related to process and workflow. RealFoundations has a proven methodology for understanding and documenting each client’s processes and workflows to tailor support to the organization’s unique ways of operating.

(4) Accelerate new asset onboarding by partnering with an external specialist

The onboarding of newly acquired asset data into your property management and accounting solution involves far more than moving data from one system to another. It requires a proven, methodical approach to mapping key datapoints between disparate systems, loading relevant financial and operational data into the new system, and then validating the data to ensure accuracy.

RealFoundations provides an end-to-end solution for the extraction, verification, and publication of information located within the lease and lease-related documents. The broader mandate of this solution is to support the abstraction of a wide range of real estate information that spans debt, valuation, financial, operational, and portfolio data categories for a variety of document types and formats.

Outsourcing technology functions in real estate can help return hours to a company's workforce by reducing the need for training, increasing efficiency in process, improving scalability, providing access to specialized expertise, and reducing system downtime. By outsourcing technology functions to an experienced provider like RealFoundations, real estate companies can focus on their core business activities, improve the customer experience, and operate with greater efficiency.

John Seaton, Chief Revenue Officer, RealFoundations John Seaton is versed in providing business process outsourcing, professional services, and enterprise technology solutions to the commercial real estate industry. He consistently aligns solutions with evolving client business objectives and leads the joint development and implementation of key strategic projects that meet or exceed client goals in the areas of retained revenue, profit margin, and cost reductions results. John has transformed inefficient and ineffective departments into cohesive and dedicated teams driven to achieve unparalleled results.

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