Breaking Property News – 12/06/2023
Daily bite-sized proptech and property news in partnership with Proptech-X.
Ascendix – What does the roadmap for the digital transformation of real estate look in 2023?
‘Everyone knows that Real estate legacy systems are core barriers for RE companies, property management firms, and commercial and residential landlords looking to modernise operations. Outdated or no longer supported solutions decrease efficiency, skyrocket costs, and reduce competitive opportunities. Causing frustration among team members, increased resource consumption and compromise profitability.
This is why many forward-thinking proptech companies update and revamp their legacy systems and, by doing so, cut down costs, optimize productivity, grow sales, and future-proof business agility.
Wes Snow CEO of Ascendix Technologies a topflight, large US based solution provider with specific expertise in the sector, has taken the time to outline in greater detail lessons learned from helping numerous clients to modernize outdated real estate solutions in a cost-compressed and scalable manner.
Real Estate Legacy Systems: A Barrier to Success in PropTech
Wes Snow feels that now many first generation Real estate legacy systems are outdated, and are use in a real estate business despite their incapability to keep up with the demands of a fast-paced proptech business. He gives three examples of how this plays out.
1 – Increased Maintenance & Support Costs
As proptech businesses grow and evolve, they face the ongoing challenge of maintaining and updating their technology systems. While legacy products may have served a valuable purpose in the past, they now become a burden for most real estate-related companies. Outdated systems limit proptech companies from integrating with new technologies, scaling products with brand-new features, and shifting to the cloud computing infrastructure. All these roadblocks lead to increased costs for support and maintenance to keep existing outdated solutions operating and profitable.
This means real estate companies with legacy systems need to waste resources to support their products instead of growing them for a higher ROI, increased sales, and market growth. The longer real estate companies support their outdated solutions, the more opportunities they lose compared to forward-looking competitors.
2 – Zero Competition & Growth Opportunities
The above-mentioned barrier is linked with another: real estate companies utilizing legacy systems lose many growth points and are often edged out by the market competition. For example, your outdated system may not allow integration with modern third-party technologies related to payment gateways, search functionality, email services, etc. This means end-users will most likely prefer feature-rich competitors’ products as they provide way more customer-centered approach.
As a result, your retention rates and sales will drop while product maintenance and marketing costs will plateau at best or climb up in a less positive scenario. This directly impacts your competitiveness and leaves few opportunities to survive in the market.
3 – Low Compatibility with Modern Technologies
The fast-paced real estate industry requires proptech vendors to integrate with modern and innovation-driven technologies and services to win customers. Brand-new features for tenants and landlords, AI-driven capabilities, advanced analytics, and streamlined search experiences are among the core real estate technology trends 2023.
Most of the above are only available if your system has high compatibility with modern tools and integrations. If it is not, you are left behind with a limited number of outdated technologies that usually do not add up much value to the existing functionality within your legacy software.
Overall, real estate legacy systems limit real estate companies from embracing digitalization and keeping a competitive edge in an increasingly digitalized proptech world.
Having set the scene, CEO Wes Snow sets out the upside of investing in future operations.
Unlock Your Real Estate Potential: The Benefits of Upgrading Your Legacy Systems
Here are up-to-date statistics that prove the high efficiency and profitability of proptech digital transformation for your business.
- 87% of real estate professionals credited technology for improved efficiency within their proptech business (National Association of Realtors).
- 78% of proptech experts experienced streamlined productivity with tech adoption (National Association of Realtors).
- 77% of real estate C-level executives believe tech-fuelled innovation drives enhanced real estate customer service (National Association of Realtors).
- 66% of home builders stated they see improved competition capacities with real estate tech adoption (National Association of Home Builders).
- 78% of real estate vendors experienced revenue growth by adopting tech-fuelled proptech solutions.
Statistics on proptech digital transformation
Wes Snow CEO of Ascendix concludes his thoughts by detailing who the four-key stakeholder winners are in this process.
Who Benefits from Hiring Real Estate Legacy Systems Experts
1 – Real Estate Companies
Real estate vendors are among the core audiences to benefit from hiring real estate legacy system experts. Multiple vendors are still utilizing outdated software that has been effective in the past, but now barriers innovation and growth.
Vetted experts with solid background in revamping real estate legacy systems help companies identify outdated product parts, assess their needs, and migrate from on-premises to cloud-based solutions. This leads to enhanced efficiency, reduced costs, and enables real estate vendors to return their market-leading positions with customer-centric and engaging proptech products.
2 – Property Management Firms
Providers dealing with portfolio and property management can also benefit from hiring domain-based experts to renovate their products. Property management vendors mostly rely on complex systems designed to manage properties and large data bundles while outdated systems often lead to stability errors, performance gaps, and low data accuracy.
For example, a property management company might hire a tech-savvy software modernization expert to help them either migrate outdated software to cloud-based infrastructure or implement a brand-new platform for efficient tenant and lease management, streamlined repair management, automated record keeping, and superior property marketing activities.
3 – Commercial and Residential Landlords
Revamping legacy systems also benefits commercial and residential landlords. First, they can transform offline-only property management into digitally enabled remote-powered administration and monitoring of properties. This allows them to allocate more time for value-added real estate activities.
Second, real estate software modernization experts help enhance financial management through automated rent collection and expense tracking that eliminates potential human factor risks and prevents landlords from spending extra time and money on financial management.
Third, upgrading legacy software helps landlords bring property marketing and leasing efforts to the next level by utilizing multiple listing solutions that help outreach to a wider audience and connect with potential vendors efficiently.
4 – Real Estate Brokerages
Real estate brokerage businesses hardly rely on tech solutions to manage their daily operations and serve clients effectively. However, outdated and hard-to-scale legacy software brings multiple roadblocks to efficient buying, selling, leasing, and renting of properties.
First, real estate brokerages can benefit from software modernization by leveraging automated workflows to eliminate most manual-only tasks and human factor risks.
Second, companies can leverage enhanced data management to store, organize, and access data more easily and efficiently. This upgrade benefits the entire real estate brokerage process from internal data management to enhanced customer service.
Third, upgrading legacy systems can help real estate brokerages enhance security. Error-prone legacy systems with data leakage risks minimize client retention rates as tenants value their data privacy and carefully choose the vendor to cooperate with. This way, renovated real estate products help brokerages protect sensitive data from cyber threats and ensure full compliance with the required regulations’.
Article by Daniel Torkutt
IAMPROPERTY grows partner network to over 6,000 estate agency branches
iamproperty has grown its Partner Agent network by 40 per cent in the last year, now working with over 6,000 Estate Agency branches across the UK, helping them to drive efficiencies, save time and accelerate their success.
Some of the latest agents to have joined the Partner Agent network include Clee Tompkinson Francis in South Wales, Bond Oxborough Philips in the South West, and Arden Estates in the West Midlands.
This growth follows a record-breaking 12-months for the business, which saw over £1.25bn worth of property sold through its auction service, as well as continued innovation and growth of its movebutler platform, which launched two new modules – enhanced Legal Preparation and Surveys.
Two major acquisitions were also completed, supporting the group’s vision to create an ecosystem of solutions for Estate Agents – solutions designed to give agents the freedom and time to do what they do best, with everything under one roof to manage their day. This includes the cloud-based property CRM solution openview, which is due to relaunch soon.
Dowen Estate Agents was one of iamproperty’s first Partner Agents and now use its full ecosystem of solutions. John Nicholson, Managing Director of Dowen Estate Agents, said: “iamproperty has become an extension of our business over the years. We started working with them to offer the option of auction to our clients which has been a great success for us. The relationship developed further when movebutler was launched and we added the compliance service. We’re now also in the early stages of using their CRM solution. Having one key supplier partnership makes our lives so much easier day-to-day. The solutions are extremely efficient and a modern way of working, with constant innovation to help us to do things in the best way to stay ahead.”
Ben Ridgway, Co-Founder of iamproperty, said: “Growth of our agent network really ramped up over the last year, as more agents turned to our solutions to help them to diversify, meet consumer demand and get their clients moving faster. Looking to the future, we want our Partner Agents to grow with us and our ambitions. We continue to innovate and develop our ecosystem of solutions, cementing our position as a Partner for agents, not just for today but for tomorrow. We have an exciting pipeline of innovation planned across our solutions for 2023 and beyond.”
Andrew Stanton Executive Editor – moving property and proptech forward. PropTech-X
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