Banna Property Group: The future of commercial property management is in the cloud

Banna Property Group is a private family property investment company, managing a portfolio of four neighbourhood shopping centres and two mixed use commercial assets across the Sydney metropolitan area.

Business Challenge: Inefficiencies of server-based systems

For years, Banna Property Group used a server-based system to manage all their commercial properties. But as the real estate industry continued to evolve and move towards more sophisticated technologies, the team at Banna Property Group quickly recognised that their paper-based, manual processes needed to evolve to stay current in the market. Operating in an increasingly competitive and fast-paced environment called for increased efficiencies, greater flexibility and collaboration across divisions, as well as an open, cloud-based technology platform that would equip them to address both current and future challenges.

Solution: Open and connected property management platform

After conducting a thorough evaluation process, Banna Property Group made the strategic decision to move to MRI Software’s Commercial Property Management Platform. Integration with third-party systems was one of their key requirements, as well as the flexibility to leverage new modules, including Accounts Payable, Commercial Management, General Ledger, and Budgeting & Forecasting. MRI’s open platform allowed them to tailor the system according to their needs, creating an all-in-one comprehensive system.

Business Impact

For the team at Banna Property Group, the move to cloud significantly increased productivity levels across the entire business. It enabled the team to work and collaborate remotely with minimal disruption to operations, which was critical during the COVID19 pandemic that ensued shortly after implementation. Furthermore, as Banna Property Group’s business continues to grow, the system is well positioned to scale and support future requirements and growth objectives.

Commercial Property Management

The MRI platform acts as a central repository for all Banna Property Group’s commercial property data, which feeds into key processes that automate certain activities including arrears management, lease expiry notification, bank guarantee and public liability management, rent review and rent roll processing. Prior to MRI implementation, many of these processes were extremely tedious and a major point of frustration within the team.

Budgeting and Forecasting

With the platform’s Budgeting and Forecasting module, Banna Property Group are now able to analyse and report on data whilst providing value add to the business. They saw significant time-savings, reducing weeks of annual budgeting processes, particularly around income modelling and outgoing recoveries setup. What used to take 2 months for their budgeting and forecasting, now takes less than a month with MRI Software.

Paul highlights: “For us, where we have seen the most significant time-saving is in the Budget and Forecasting module. We have been pleased and impressed with the setup and functionality of this module. We have been able to save weeks out of the annual budgeting process.”

Third-party systems integration

The ability to integrate with third party systems was a huge contributing factor in their decision to proceed with MRI. It has streamlined operations and provided high levels of automation across end-to-end processes. Notably, a key benefit that the team has realised since implementing MRI is a significant reduction in manual handling and double handling of data that often lead to inaccurate reporting. It has improved both the quality of outputs that Banna Property rely on to make strategic decisions, as well as empowered the whole team to access and use the information to their advantage.

Paul notes: “MRI is capable of enabling us to scale up as the business continues to grow and we acquire more properties in the future.”