The real estate industry is changing rapidly. In 2019, more than 5.5 million existing homes were sold in the United States, and more activity is moving online. According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), 50% of all buyers found the home they purchased on the Internet. While the Internet has changed some aspects of the process, it remains slow and inefficient.
Despite the value of the real estate market, it remains stubbornly manual. Many processes haven’t changed in decades – in-person meetings, signed documents, and paperwork define the industry. 20% of all buyers consider paperwork to be the most challenging step of the home buying process, according to the National Association of Realtor research. Automation can ease this paperwork step so you can close more deals.
Automation technologies are finally changing the industry. Unlike other emerging technologies, you don’t have to wait for innovations to arrive. These are wins you can achieve right now. Let’s start with improving top-line revenue with real estate automation.
Robotic Process Automation For Real Estate Sales: Two Processes To Automate This Year
The pain of closing a real estate transaction prevents some deals from happening. It also increases the chances of poor customer experience for the buyer or seller. If a client has a poor experience in a transaction, they are less likely to provide referrals and do repeat business. Fortunately, robotic process automation(RPA) for real estate can help in several ways.
- Closing Process. In the final days and hours of a real estate transaction, emotions tend to run high. The seller wants the money so they can move on. The agent wants the commission they have worked hard for, and the buyer wants to start a new chapter in their life. With all these concerns, automation can expedite the filing, analysis, and verification of new forms which will reduce closing times for all parties.
- New Client Onboarding. Some companies use checklists to gather information from new clients. However, it is sometimes difficult to gather all the required information consistently every time. Robotic process automation can reach out to new prospects to collect all the needed data you need to start the relationship right. That means you can walk into your first face to face meeting with a deep understanding of what the client wants.
Finding the right real estate task to automate is easy when you use a few guidelines. First, identify tasks that are done repeatedly (e.g., monthly reports or new client process). Second, determine how much of that task can be reduced to rules such as entering or processing data in an Excel spreadsheet. Each task you find that meets these two rules are candidates for automation.
By automating these tasks, real estate professionals will gain more time for sales, networking, and other high-value activities.
How Property Managers Save Time With Robotic Process Automation
As a property manager, you need to manage three factors to achieve success: the property owner, the property, and the tenants. Neglect any one of these factors, and the business suffers. From an automation standpoint, there are significant opportunities to improve tenant management. Take new tenant screening. It can take several days simply to gather the necessary baseline data like verifying past addresses, credit cards, and criminal background checks. Once that information is received, your staff have to assess the data.
To streamline your processes, apply robotic process automation to these property management activities.
Cut Your Vacancy Rate By Bringing In Quality Tenants More Quickly.
Effective tenant selection is an art and science. Get it wrong, and you end up with tenants who damage the property, fail to pay the rent and worse. Use robotic process automation to screen tenants upfront. Specifically, you can process a potential tenant’s application into your database and run analytics on that data. This can save you hours of administrative effort. That means you can focus on effective conversations with your tenants. If you take too long to respond to the potential tenant, they will go elsewhere, and you will lose revenue.
Optimize Back Office Operations.
It may not be sexy, but reporting is critical to keeping the property owner satisfied. They want to know about costs, tenant turnover, and issues that impact the property’s value. RPA helps by gathering data, cleaning it, and getting it ready for presentation. That’s important. For example, you may have ten vendors that provide services to your properties like cleaning, repairs, and landscaping. Instead of manually reviewing each invoice before payment, use automation rules to evaluate the invoice. In seconds, an automation pool can recommend the invoice for payment based on rules you set (e.g., the price on the invoice matches the price in the contract). That means less time spent on administrative tasks each month.
How To Get Quick Wins In Real Estate Automation Without Stretching Your Tech Team
When you hear about automation’s power to boost the bottom line in real estate, you might ask your IT team to work on it. However, the real estate sector tends to have limited technology resources. That means that an in-house solution is unlikely to work. Reach out to a top-ranked software development agency, like Blue Orange Digital, to discuss how they can deliver real estate automation in 90 days or less.
