If real estate businesses don’t automate, they’re going to fall behind. Now more than ever teams must streamline. Automation is one way to do that.
Plan for the future
The commercial real estate industry is changing rapidly right now, and it’s not going to wait for real estate companies that fall behind. Demand is shifting and customer expectations are changing. Your commercial tenants and buyers are having to make major adjustments, so you’ll need to be able to keep up.
The way you ran your business ten years ago isn’t going to work in the future. Not all real estate businesses are going to continue to be successful in the wake of change. Or in the wake of the fall-out as a result of COVID-19. But by taking advantage of opportunities like automation, you can change your corner of the real estate industry on your own terms.
Think back to the days when every employee had to punch in and out by hand. Each pay period, someone had to gather all those punch cards. Then they had to calculate all earning heads and statutory applicable deductions on paper. The slightest human error while processing payroll could be a disaster. That’s why almost all companies these days use a computerized, automated payroll system like QuickBooks. It’s much faster and has less potential for mistakes.
But there are so many other areas where you can vastly improve efficiencies using automated processes. This includes tracking your overall cash flow and operating performance. Or, keeping track of your tenants and investors, managing your loans, managing net lease. The list goes on and on. Imagine having near immediate access to your cash flow across your portfolio and no manual intervention. Powerful, right?
Not convinced that automation is necessary for your back office? Here are some of the downsides to delaying automation.
What happens when you delay automating tasks:
You’ll limit your ability to reduce costs.
Now more than ever, teams need to look for ways to reduce overhead costs. Automating tasks is the first place to look. Manually pulling and aggregating information takes staff time. What tasks are you doing that you could rely on a system to do? Check out our ROI calculator to see if there is something you could automate: STRATAFOLIO ROI Calculator.
You’ll limit your ability to provide confidence and build trust.
Many companies struggle to build confidence and trust between themselves and their customers. Or in the case of a real estate company, with their tenants, partners and investors. And when you’re trying to keep up with everything manually, it’s very hard to provide the transparency and the wealth of data that could be accessed with good automated systems.
You’ll find it much more difficult to scale your business.
Are you still using manual processes in your back office? Whether you’re paying the bills or sending out notifications to tenants, it’s so much more difficult to scale these processes when you’re doing them manually. Because as you grow, these tasks will also become much more time-consuming and difficult to organize. But with software that handles these tasks for you, you’ll be able to manage a lot more business in the same amount of time.
You’ll be missing out on valuable, actionable information.
Manual processes can make it difficult to visualize data across the board when it comes to tracking investors, leases, cash flow, debt management and more. But when you start automating processes, you’ll be able to gather data that can greatly help you run your business more efficiently.
You’ll lose customers to more tech-savvy businesses.
When you’re trying to get customers to come to you and remain with you, it’s important that you make it easy for them. Automating your back-office processes doesn’t just simplify your job. It can greatly reduce friction for your customers as well. And…more importantly, so your resources for value-add activities.
Get started with STRATAFOLIO today and find out how efficient your back-office can be!
