Main Challenges of Property Rental and Service Managers
Maintaining profitability has become challenging for most of the real estate rental and service businesses especially during the Covid-19 lockdown as reduced revenue churn gets added to the general uncertainty of the business ecosystem.
The best way to survive the testing times and grow the business is to identify the core issues and find sustainable solutions. Here, we discuss the three major challenges almost every business from the sector struggles with at some point of time.
Unplanned maintenance
Maintenance is an ongoing process in the real estate service and rental industry and is easier to handle when it is planned. However, there always exist the possibilities of unplanned maintenance and incident management scenarios. If there are no processes to conduct periodic checks and initiate regular maintenance, the chances of such unplanned maintenance increase. Furthermore, many facilities don’t have effective request tracking mechanisms to ensure timely resolutions.
Service and payment issues
Manually handling financial records is challenging and highly susceptible to errors. Not only does payment and service agreement monitoring becomes time-consuming; there is also a great risk of missing track of your financial transactions and records of services provided to the clients.
Losing this data would lead to misuse of real estate properties and resources that could have otherwise bought profit to your business.
Poor communication
Real estate rental and service business requires frequent communication with tenants and clients about a variety of issues throughout the day. Misplacing these details due to poor communication creates confusion between processes. This could result in rental payments go unpaid, renewal deadlines getting missed, and service requests goes unattained, and even leave you wondering about the status of the rentals and services done. All these could significantly impact the bottom line of your business.
Modern technology has brought smart solutions to ease out these difficulties. Businesses implementing advanced ERP solutions are able to cope with these challenges better. According to a Gartner’s report, “By 2022, cloud ERP should be the preferred option for more than 75% of midsize companies and for more than 40% of large enterprises aiming to transform their monolithic legacy ERP estate.”
5 Key Areas Where ERP Adds Value to a Rental and Service Business
To run a well-managed real estate rental and service company, you need to continually adapt to the changing business environment. Automation, which follows the deployment of ERP software, solves this issue and most of the other problems that as a property owner or manager you struggle with on a daily basis. The right rental ERP software enables you to achieve business productivity through the following features and capabilities.
Centralized data
Real estate rental and service businesses deal with numerous tenants and clients simultaneously. ERP system facilitates easy management of these multiple ventures through a unified platform. The software solution allows storing and accessing of the business data in one place, making it easier to record, manage and monitor information across all business operations.
Furthermore, centralized data provides you with greater visibility into information for all stages of the rental and service processes. From purchases, quotations, maintenance and repairs to reservations and rent collections, you can track and analyse all data to gain total control over your business.
Better collaboration
Establishing effective communication among employees and technicians working on-site and off-site is essential to ensure the smooth functioning of the real estate service and rental business.
An ERP solution bridges the communication gap between your workforces from different departments. It allows them to make use of the system’s dashboard to share and update information and improve collaboration so that services are not marred with delays.
Operational proficiency
Automation is the key to operational proficiency.
ERP system automates day-to-day operations in your organization. It eliminates repetitive processes such as notifying tenants about their rent due date, collecting payments, scheduling planned maintenance, handling repair requests, and so on. It eliminates manual tracking of the data and reduces human errors. This helps you to make better use of your resources and improve overall business productivity while ensuring the receivables keep flowing in on time.
Optimizing service plans
To predict accurate service cost it is necessary to map the resources such as labor, raw materials, and machinery that would be needed for maintenance. Equip rental and service businesses with real estate ERP software to keep track of the resources required and their procurement costs. This information helps you effectively calculate expenditure; allocate the budget and timeline required to complete operations.
This guarantees efficient utilization of resources and manpower so that your service remains within the allotted budget and does not miss deadlines.
Data-driven decision making
Data-driven business decisions are always more accurate and effective. An ERP software ensures that all your business data is securely stored while allowing you to access them in real-time. Information transparency provides deeper insights into your asset portfolio, maintenance work done, cash flow, tenant agreement, invoices, and more details. This aids you to make timely and accurate decisions every time.
Most Used ERP Modules in Rental and Service Business
ERP software is meant to increase the productivity of your real estate business. However, the system can only work efficiently when it is integrated with all necessary modules. These include:
Supply Chain Management : to improve control over inventories and synchronize demand with supply.
Asset Management : to record, maintain, and manage all your real estate properties with cloud ERP accessible on mobile devices
Financial Management : to consolidate all financial data for improving accounting accuracy and meeting reporting requirements needed to measure and improve business performance.
Project Management : to plan and track resources, manage machinery and raw materials in order to meet or exceed client expectations for service standards.
Finding Best Rental and Service ERP for your Business
Not all rental software is designed to cater to all of your business needs. While some software may not be integrated with all the modules required to run a real estate service and rental business, others may include a lot of functionalities that you would not have any need of. In both cases, you would end up paying for a system that won’t help you achieve the desired business growth.
Our experts understand these concerns and so have designed a time-tested, cloud-based ERP for service industry. It is ready-to-use software that can also be customized to suit your unique business needs. If you are looking for a software solution that would help you take to your business to the next level, fill in the form and we’ll guide you on how it works.