In the residential or commercial property and rental market, customers have a lot of choice. It tends to be quite crowded, with new entrants all the time and differentiators often being just an over-enthusiastic estimate of price or a slicing of margins to grab the customer.

As you get bigger, size and market exposure can kick in but even then, a bad experience can knock the hard-earned reputation, so protection of the ‘customer-experience’ is an important factor to keep to the fore.

Many businesses diversify out beyond sales to cover property management for the rental sector and this opens up a whole new layer of customer experience for both landlords and tenants, with opportunities for additional revenue but also to really mess things up.

With the multitude of services, insurances, certificates, approvals, documentation, suppliers, payments, invoices and reports, just management of a single property can be complicated, and this is where property management systems come in.

Our customer wanted to fully embrace the customer-experience, making it their clear market differentiator, leap frogging the competition, taking things further. Not just providing property services but optionally provide services which border on the concierge; making the simple rental an overall stay-experience (even further than your typical Air BnB!).

And for this, your bog-standard property management system just doesn't hit the mark.

We needed to take the principles of property management and flip them on their head from a customer experience perspective. Everything had to be about how the customer or prospective customer would experience the process of buying, renting, or living in the property from initial contact, through to completion or check-out and beyond.

This fresh look at the process allowed us to build a much more efficient model for the business and all its necessary features than could ever be achieved from on-line, off-the-shelf systems, whilst taking into account the ever present need to work with the Office 365 tools and systems we are all familiar with (e.g. Outlook, Word, PDF, Teams)

Securely hosting the solution as a ‘cloud-first’ system, we were able to produce a specially designed, branded, and familiar interface which engaged the office team immediately, allowing them to get up to speed and understand the system with virtually no training.

Customers were provided with a ‘self-service’ portal, so they could handle the more repeatable activities themselves, providing immediate response, taking the load off the office staff for more important issues, reducing costs (or improving margins!), and giving the customer relationship more time.

Suppliers had something similar, allowing them to be issued with jobs, accept, confirm, and track payments, and for the office to monitor progress and supplier performance.

So with the addition of features such as direct integration to their finance system, mapping, property and supplier dashboards and customer activity monitoring, the business was able to manage the property in a much more dynamic way than before.

A clear benefit of a fresh, cloud approach, was the seamless interactions we were able to achieve with integrations to Mobile Notifications, SMS, Email, WhatsApp and Telephone Systems, bringing all the information together into a single place, so all correspondence and interactions were recorded with no chance of lost information.

With the introduction of a mobile app, we were able to allow the agent to simply sync their device (iPad etc) with the cloud before leaving on a visit to ensure they were up to date in case there was no coverage.

The inclusion of mapping to navigate to the property together with arrival notifications (if late), allowed the customer to be kept informed.

Integration with the company back-office system ensured staff could continue to use their single login, so security was a non-issue.

Finally, bringing access to mobile photos and videos provided that additional layer of transparent information, not only as actual content, but providing the time and location of the photo to complete the records for the business, customer and supplier(s).

There were many more features and plenty of scope for further development, but every business is different and unlike those ‘off-the-shelf’ solutions, you shouldn't expect you to pay for features you neither want nor need.

This system was developed using whats called a low-code development platform, which meant we were able to deliver this solution in a much shorter time and at a fraction of the cost of other systems, so if you are an SME, disappointed with the on-line offerings and want to consider a solution that meets all your requirements, give us a call.