With the massive shift to online working, learning and socialization that has taken place over the past year, the customer experience is more important than ever. In the real estate industry, the relationship between you and your customers no longer revolves around the lease – now, it relies on the customer themselves, whether they’re a resident or a commercial tenant.

Technology that puts the customer first

With the real estate industry transitioning away from paper documentation and trending towards data and digital usage, it is clear that integrated portals and other forms of mobile and web-based technologies are critical to support customer engagement. But while self-service extensions of transactional systems are the most common starting point, there are a bevy of customer engagement solutions now finding their way into the real estate industry.

These new capabilities are helping businesses place the customer (not the lease) at the center of the relationship by emphasizing certain categories, such as:

• Lifecycle tracking – Understand the tenant from pre-tenancy to post-tenancy, their needs and where they are in the lifecycle. It includes features like pre-tenancy tracking of leasing opportunities, pre-move-in tracking of paperwork and space readiness, tenancy tracking of satisfaction, financial health, lease options and upcoming renewals, as well as post-tenancy tracking of exit reasons and destination.
• Communication history – Track every phone call, email, and text message, both inbound and outbound so that any member of the team can engage with the customer on an open issue or as a follow-up to a prior item.
• Interaction history – See a full history of communications and compile information regarding portal logins, service requests, complaints, payment activity, after hour needs and any other touchpoint between you and your customer.
• Comparative data – Understand how this tenant compares to other, similar tenants. This is especially important in retail, where performance can be similar in a category of stores. Leveraging analytics and BI solutions can drive future business in other properties where tenant profiles match desired tenancy characteristics. It can also show early signs of distress with existing tenants as compared to a peer group.

Tracking and managing the relationship from prospect to tenant and throughout a tenancy provides a richer context for business. Understanding all touchpoints between a customer and the real estate enterprise can provide important color on renewal negotiations. Learn about the other real estate technology strategies that can benefit your business.

It’s no secret that real estate businesses generate massive amounts of data as part of their everyday operations. But how can this data be used to your advantage to differentiate your business and make more informed decisions?

Big Data was originally defined by Gartner as larger, more complex data sets, especially from new data sources. These data sets are so voluminous that traditional data processing software just can’t manage them. But however cumbersome this data may be, it can be used to address complex business problems even during an era that’s defined by uncertainty and the need for flexibility.

Developing a data strategy for real estate

To best approach the growing masses of data, you’ll need a plan and an enterprise-wide set of policies that define how data will be collected, stored, processed and communicated. These policies should address data ownership, quality, access, security, privacy, ethics and retention. It should include master data management practices that cover entering, aggregating, consolidating, de-duping, standardizing, and maintaining data throughout the enterprise.

Unfortunately, enterprises typically realize they need data governance and master data management well after data is being captured and struggles to make sense from data become all too real. But in this case, that’s okay! Why? Because the future is full of data – far more so than the past. The trick is to make sure your business is ready for what the future holds.

How can you best harness data?

After tapping into and organizing data, the next challenge is to find the signal in the noise. Your business must find the data that really matters and that can help drive better business results, better workflows and better customer and stakeholder service.

While traditional reporting still serves to memorialize a point in time, you can do better. Real estate executives should not need to search through a wall of numbers, an alphabetically sorted list of properties, to uncover the metrics that need their attention.

It is increasingly important to take those key data elements from reports and move them to dashboards and dynamic grids with the ability to interact and to drill down. Sorting and filtering make data more consumable. The ability to drill down into underlying transactions, lease terms, data sources and contract obligations makes business-critical information more accessible and allows for self-guided discovery of further insights. Finding the signal in the noise is not about all the data, it is about the right data, in the right place, at the right time, for the right user.

Pushing your real estate enterprise to be more data driven is imperative. Enterprises should use historical data to inform on future trends, pointing you to likely outcomes and potential options while using current data to benchmark across your portfolio, driving up performance.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) grows in deployment, more and more data will become available, allowing for smarter uses of data to differentiate both decision making and services. Tuning space conditions to daily occupancy and usage patterns, understanding out-of-norm conditions that require maintenance, and much more. And we have not even scratched the surface of what the data scientists will do to drive further differentiation based on our vast array of data.

In a world that is increasingly dominated by data, those who can see clearly into their data are the ones who will gain the competitive advantage. Learn how you can equip your organization with the tools and solutions needed to harness and understand your data.

In March 2020, when the pandemic hit and a state of emergency was declared, a large portion of the workforce, especially office-based staff, decamped and quickly transitioned to working from home. Business processes pivoted to embrace paperless processing, digital signatures, and video conferencing. Zoom meetings became the rage and “You’re on mute” was the phrase of 2020.

As 2020 wore on, it became clear that working from home was possible, and even successful, at scale. Naturally, this led to the more recent conversation about what we now need from an office, if we need one at all. While some small, satellite offices have been rationalized, the consensus is that an enterprise needs a home and its people need to come together…but maybe not like they did previously.

Considerations for the future of the workplace

While each enterprise must assess what is best for them, discussions and decisions will center around the following:

Density – Space per employee has been shrinking, as has distance from others, and the pandemic will surely drive against that trend, creating more required space per person and raising the importance of space planning and flexibility.

Assigned desks vs. hoteling – The days of assigned seating may be behind us, especially if a significant part of the workforce continues to work from home with increasing frequency.

Meeting rooms and collaborative space – We’ll also have to rethink meeting rooms as it is unlikely that people will be excited to overcrowd any given space just to be part of a meeting. These rooms need to give way to better collaborative spaces as teams return to the office together.

Flexible space – Both indoor and outdoor open spaces have grown in popularity. In order to drive collaboration and culture, having large spaces that can be quickly repurposed will be of increasing importance as ways to bring larger groups together safely without sacrificing utility during more normal business activities.

Space as a service – Ancillary income can be brought into the organization by making some of your space available on marketplaces like WeWork. Similarly, space needs outside of non-core office areas may be met with the use of flexible space from similar marketplaces and providers. The ability to quickly flex space up and down to meet needs is a growing trend.

How technology can transform your office environment

In addition to defining how space will be used, there are a number of opportunities to leverage technologies for space access and usage:

Space planning tools – These can help your organization clearly and visually understand space layouts, staff density, flow and other elements of the configuration and to create alternatives that provide for the space options listed above.

Workspace reservation systems – As space becomes more fluid, technology can be used to facilitate workspace and collaboration space reservations, including in-space displays of current and coming reservations.

Entry/exit timing tools – There are certain high traffic moments that must be addressed when returning to the office. Interestingly, the lunch period is often more densely trafficked than the start or end of the day. To better ensure social distancing, some organizations are using time blocks to manage peak traffic to better address employee safety.

Access control and on-location awareness – Understanding who has access to a space, where they are allowed and, most importantly, if they are on-location is increasingly important. Presence management is key for:

• Air quality and other HVAC/climate sensors – Air quality and efficacy of filtration functions should be added to existing systems to ensure temperature is economically managed in conjunction with space usage.
• On-location messaging – Broadcast or individualized messaging can better facilitate entry and exit windows and space assignments while also providing a method for communications about various safety alerts and visitor services.
• Wayfinding – With more fluid use of space, employees may need wayfinding assistance to get to and from their key locations or to a colleague.
• Health and safety tracking – Unfortunately, contact tracing will still be an important topic as we get back to the office.

In-room video conferencing tools – Given the success that has been enjoyed with video conferencing capabilities, meeting rooms and other collaborative spaces will need to be fit with updated technologies that allow for in-person and remote staff to be equally included in collaborative experiences as the days of poor audio over a speakerphone are long gone.

As we continue further into 2021, the workplace will be reshaped not through incremental evolution, but with the lessons of a prolonged pause, a rapid adoption of technology and much thought about what a mobile, distributed, hyper-connected workforce really needs.

Learn more about the future of the workspace and how technology can help you prepare.

Real estate occupiers have been rethinking the traditional workplace even before the COVID-19 pandemic. A year into the “new normal” of working from home, attitudes and market trends have shifted dramatically, and it’s become increasingly clear that the workspace will not look the same when employees are invited back into their respective offices.

Tenants need to meet the new and changing expectations of their employees, and organizations are being challenged to rethink their use of office space, consider the safety and well-being of their staff, and understand how hybrid and flexible work models impact the future of office planning.

1. How will offices be used once employees return to work?

Bringing employees back into an office setting won’t be as easy as it sounds. Some employees have settled into this “new normal” and believe that returning to the office full time would be detrimental to productivity, while others look forward to going back to the traditional workplace. As companies navigate changing attitudes, the office space will have to be made appealing again. The office won’t just be a place where work gets done – it will be a place where people come to collaborate. Rows of cramped desks might need to give way to new spacing requirements, and small common areas that once brought employees together for lunch could be expanded into large spaces that focus more on community than rest.

2. Ensure staff safety and wellbeing on a global scale

While companies look to turn their offices into more collaborative, spaced-out environments, many of them will still have to contend with frequently changing health and safety regulations across multiple continents, countries, and cities. In additional to keeping up disparate safety requirements, the culture of work is likely to impact different office locations. While some in the US and the UK may not be comfortable returning to the office, many employees in the APAC region have already returned to their offices comfortably. This will present a unique challenge for global companies.

3. Explore flexible, hybrid workplace models

Taken together, these dynamics paint a picture of a future workplace that focuses on flexibility and adaptability above all else. Each company, region, office, and employee has dealt with the impacts of the pandemic differently, and workplaces will need to throw out the traditional “one size fits all” office layout in order to best accommodate all of the disparate needs and changing market trends.

How technology can help you plan the future of the office

In response both to health guidelines and market trends that favor space, flexibility, and collaboration, workstations across the office will need to be spaced out, and in many cases, rearranged altogether with the help of space management tools. Creating enough space between desks won’t just help the property remain in compliance with local health guidelines, but it can also provide employees with peace of mind, boosting productivity. In addition, visitor management solutions can help offices cut down on foot traffic and manage all non-employee staff that enter the building – a huge step toward ensuring the safety and security of everyone on the property.

On the subject of desks being rearranged, organizations may also have to accommodate employees who don’t want to return to the. office. One of the things we’re seeing in the return to the office is that many people want to remain either fully remote or on a hybrid work schedule, meaning that not every desk within the office will be filled at all times. Taking on an approach of “hotdesking” – where several employees might be assigned to one desk at different times throughout the week – can help offices consolidate desks and desk space.

With companies using fewer desks as a result of hotdesking or even hoteling, commercial tenants might come to find that they no longer need as much office space as they once did. In these cases, landlords and tenants will need to potentially reevaluate lease obligations and reach new lease agreements. Before taking on this process, both parties will need to have clear understandings of what’s in their leases so they can effectively communicate and agree upon new terms moving forward.

As landlords and tenants both look ahead to a time when offices will reopen, both need to be prepared to collaborate in order to address changing market trends and disparate needs among employees and other staff. Learn more about the trends impacting the return to the office.

The events of the pandemic, in combination with the availability of technology, have forever changed the relationship between the things we do and the place we do them. When many office-based workers were sent home in March 2020, business did not stop. With a quick pivot, business thrived and proved that there was another way, a digital way, to continue operations, maintain effectiveness and drive new efficiencies.

The digital pivot, driven by necessity, must now be tuned to the default way to enable business. Actions should continue to eliminate all forms of paper, provide self-service capabilities to all stakeholders, ensure systems can be accessed from anywhere and enable instrumentation and virtual representation.

Eliminate all forms of paper

If success in real estate is based on location, location, location, it seems that the lifeblood of many real estate enterprises is paper, paper, paper. Contracts, drawings, invoices, leases, checks, reports, work orders, and many more paper items are at the core of many business processes.

While some of these items have been reduced during the pandemic, there remain a number of opportunities to further eradicate paper from day-to-day practices. If not already implemented, real estate enterprises should review and implement systems like:

• Automated payables systems to streamline the requisition, procurement, invoicing and AP payment processes
• Digital contracts, leases and other documents with electronic signatures
• Electronic payment capabilities for residents/tenants and other types of receivables
• Digital mechanisms for the assembly and distribution of reporting packages

These types of solutions typically include the capability for the involved stakeholders to interact directly as part of a redesigned business process, through self-service portals.

Provide self service capabilities to all stakeholders

Often in business processes, we move from digital to paper when we exit the four walls of the enterprise or we get outside the specific users of a system. To fully digitize a process, it must be complete from end to end, for all parties, and for all inputs and outputs.

There are many opportunities to service the stakeholders of real estate with portals and mobile apps that are designed for specific roles:

• Residents and Tenants – Offering transactional capabilities for payment and service requests as well as additional features like amenity reservations, package tracking, community forums, property handbooks, emergency contacts and much more
• Vendors and Suppliers – Offering the ability to make requests for good and services, submit invoices and check on the status of payments
• Owners and Investors – Offering an elegant channel for communications on performance, distributions, tax documents and other important updates

When self-service capabilities are leveraged, stakeholders are able to find information on their own rather than asking enterprise staff for it. Staff can be available to answer questions about the content, as opposed to providing the information in the first place. These capabilities are also accessible independent of location.

Ensure all systems can be accessed from anywhere

For both external stakeholders as well as internal staff, access to systems and data independent of location has never been more important. With work from home policies likely to continue through 2021 and a new hybrid model likely to become the new norm, enterprises can no longer assume that every employee will be doing their work in the same place every day. As such, all systems need to be accessible from anywhere.

Further, software applications need to be made simple for employees to use and traverse, especially where multiple applications are part of a role or a business process. This requires close attention to data integration, identity management, and most importantly, facilitation of cross-solution workflows and reporting. This ubiquitous access is typically delivered via cloud-based solutions.

With the operational elements of the business appropriately enabled and paperless, there are other fronts to attack as it relates to digitization.

Enable instrumentation and virtual representation

There is much talk of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the additional capabilities, visibility, and services it can bring. The instrumentation of properties is nearly boundless, and enterprises should work to find the projects that can generate cost savings or improve upon the experience within the building.

HVAC, access control, utility consumption, and contact tracing are just a few areas where sensors are being deployed to gather data, provide insight, and even launch business processes.

As more of a property is instrumented, a digital twin is a very effective way to present the information in the context of the property itself. The underlying building information model (BIM) can also be used for virtual reality and augmented reality applications, both of which are gaining traction as consumers seek virtual or self-guided exploration of spaces, sometimes before engaging with leasing staff.

In physically separating people from their offices, their employers, and each other, the pandemic has forced organizations across the globe to create connection and flexibility with technology. Digitizing your businesses won’t just serve the near-future challenges as we come out of the pandemic, it will prepare you for a future in which keeping people connected will continue to drive productivity, whether people are gathered in one place or many.

The past year has been challenging for nearly every segment of the real estate industry. The COVID-19 pandemic initiated massive changes in behavior and transformed how people interact with property. Working from home, non-essential store closures, increased demands for home delivery, a collapse in dining, sports and entertainment, eviction moratoriums and mass unemployment have challenged every corner of real estate. At the same time, in order to maintain operations and serve customers, the pandemic also accelerated technology adoption, shining the spotlight on PropTech.

In 2021, PropTech continues to be at the forefront of the ongoing transformation of the real estate industry. There are six key strategies that should be embraced to ensure success, to drive value and to get the most from the technologies that are available today while positioning for the ones on the horizon.

Digitalize now

Technology continues to be the main enabler in separating activities from the places in which they usually occur. The pandemic has accelerated many of those trends, especially in real estate. With quick pivots from companies across the globe, business went forward even as office-based employees were sent home. Business thrived and proved that there was another way, a digital way, to continue operations, maintain effectiveness and drive new efficiencies. Driven by necessity, the digital pivot must now be mainstreamed as one of the default ways to enable business.

Differentiate with data

With such a rapid transition to online activities over the past few years, many traditional data processing systems can no longer manage the voluminous data sets of the modern era – what we know today as “big data.” No matter how overwhelming it may be, this mass of data can be incredibly useful when it comes to addressing business problems that you might not have been able to tackle before. The trick is finding the signal in the noise. To best utilize and manage all of this data, you’ll need an enterprise-wide set of policies that define how data will be collected, stored, processed and communicated. In short, you’ll need a strategy and a set of tools to enable it.

Plan to win

This pandemic has created the most challenging moment for planning and forecasting since the Great Recession over a decade ago. But where the Recession impacted real estate in very specific ways, the effects of the pandemic are disrupting real estate in a much broader and deeper sense. In spite of all the unknowns, the need to reforecast 2021 and the years ahead provides an opportunity for technology to help lead the way. For short term planning and forecasting, integrated planning and budgeting tools can make quick work of using past periods to drive future period forecasts while providing for both general and specific assumptions.

Manage risk and compliance

Managing risk and compliance is a job with no end. New challenges arise and old ones evolve in unexpected ways. As new regulations are enacted by federal, state and local agencies, technology and data can make the never-ending quest to mitigate risk and remain in compliance a little less daunting. When risk is managed and fraud is eliminated, both the property and residents benefit and create a stronger, safer community.

Engage customers

With the world going paperless, it is clear that integrated virtual portals and other forms of web-based technologies are critical for customer engagement. While self-service extensions of transaction systems are the most common starting point, there are plenty of other customer engagement solutions now finding their footing in the real estate industry. These new capabilities are placing the customer (or in this case, the resident/tenant) at the center of the relationship, which is where the lease used to be. It’s about relationships, not accounting.

Reinvent the workplace

When the pandemic first started to impact organizations a year ago, a large portion of the workforce, especially office-based staff, decamped and quickly transitioned to working from home. Business processes quickly pivoted to paperless processing, digital signatures, and video conferencing. With 2020 behind us, we can confidently say that working from home full time is not just possible for many; it can be a setup for success. This begs the question: What do we need from a future office space…if one is needed at all?

Technology adoption and innovation continues, and PropTech has never been in a better position to drive positive change for real estate enterprises and their customers. Digitalized processes, data-driven differentiation, tech-powered planning processes, improved risk and compliance management, greatly enhanced customer engagement and the reinvention of the workplace are six key technology strategies that should be embraced in 2021 and used as a foundation for the rest of the decade.

For a corporate occupier, managing the complex leases within the organization’s property portfolio is a tedious endeavor, especially given how difficult it can be to ascertain the true monetary value of a lease.

When it comes to managing a large portfolio of complicated leases, human error is one of the biggest risks your organization faces as the simplest of mistakes could cost a lot of money. At MRI Software, our team of lease administration experts interact with clients daily to catch many of these errors before they happen.

Here are three key areas in which common slip ups could have resulted in real estate occupiers losing out on big money.

Unreliable lease abstraction

It’s not uncommon for important data points to get lost in the time-consuming process of manually pulling information from your leases and contracts. Collecting all of the data, provisions, and terms from your leases – and knowing where that information can be found quickly – is a top way to drive cost savings. Utilizing “deep lease data” can benefit your business by bringing to light automatic renewal provisions, security deposit billings, and improvement allowances.

With inefficient lease abstraction, automatic renewal provisions in leases and contracts can sometimes go unnoticed, especially if the lease has been added to your portfolio through a large acquisition. If left undiscovered, these renewal provisions can cost your organization a whole 12 months’ worth of rent. In large acquisitions like this, you could also be losing out on security deposits that your accounting department won’t have an accrual for, meaning the deposit will be paid out. With a more efficient review of these leases and through cross-referencing with legal documents, these deposits could be accounted for.

Poorly tracked improvement projects

Major facilities management projects that involve multiple departments (and, as such, multiple points of contact) could also be exposing your organization to financial losses. If the improvement allowances tied to these projects aren’t properly tracked, it could end up costing millions of dollars in delay costs and funds not collected from landlords.

Rent payment and processing errors

There are plenty of steps in the rent payment and collection process that could be exposing your organization to financial risk. Whether due to technical errors, oversights, or landlords in accidental misalignment with their leases, money can easily fall through the cracks, and considering that rent serves as the largest dollar spend in most organizations, that money can add up fast.

One step of the rent collection process where errors can occur is in the application of late fees. Sometimes, late fees are applied when they’re not supposed to be – it’s even possible that a landlord might have set their system to charge rent as late until marked otherwise. If rent is paid on time and charged with late fees anyway, that could end up costing your organization thousands. Similar errors can occur in the simple act of rent payment. If a payment isn’t applied to the corresponding account in a timely manner, there’s a risk that the money could get lost in a landlord’s bank account.

Catch mistakes before they impact your business

Having the right technology and expert advice to manage your leases can save your organization thousands of dollars. Whether it’s through AI-powered lease abstraction tools that pull critical terms and key data out of your leases or through a committed team of experts that can catch errors in rent payment processes through monthly reconciliation, MRI Software’s lease administration solutions can enable you to tap into the full potential of your data, drive cost savings, and simplify your leases. Learn more about how much your leases could be costing your organization.

2021 marks the 50th anniversary of MRI Software, and we are thrilled to celebrate this milestone with our clients, partners and staff around the world. We were excited to close out 2020 (I mean, who wasn’t?) because we couldn’t wait to kick off our anniversary festivities!

The golden anniversary of MRI Software

The PC hadn’t even been invented when MRI was founded in 1971, but we were already pioneering the real estate software space. The business was launched in Cleveland, Ohio, and initially focused on residential real estate clients, with commercial products added soon after.

Wondering how we automated our clients’ property accounting functions in the days before fancy computers? We processed client paperwork and turned it into professional-looking printed reports overnight with our IBM 360-20 mainframe, mag tapes, punch cards and disk packs. Once we got our hands on a Xerox 9700 printer, our commercial real estate product was unstoppable!

A history lesson: Global expansion and growth

The industry was poised for revolution – there was a huge opportunity to provide business services for the unique needs of commercial and residential real estate companies. MRI pioneered the industry and set the stage for Proptech as we know it today.

If you follow the history of MRI, you know that the company has grown significantly in recent years, notably in the EMEA and Asia-Pacific regions. MRI’s presence in APAC actually dates back to the 1990s, when we were one of the first providers in the region. The expansion outside of our Cleveland headquarters accelerated in 2002, when MRI became part of Intuit and was known as Intuit Real Estate Solutions (IRES). In 2010, Intuit spun out the real estate division and MRI Software was once again a standalone business.

Fast-forward a few years to 2015, when our aggressive growth strategy took off. The company expanded even more, first to Toronto, then Atlanta, bolstering its Investment Solutions offering along the way. The journey accelerated after that, with the addition of teams in South Africa, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and India. But MRI’s growth was about more than increasing its global footprint – the company strategically expanded its offerings and entered new markets, adding innovative solutions for automated communications, risk management, payments, and the underserved government-subsidized housing sector.

Today, we are proud to have clients and staff on all continents except Antarctica (we’re working on it). We continue to push the limits of innovation for real estate technology, and as a result, MRI was named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies in the US in 2020 (and 2021!). Not bad for an established business that’s been around since 1971.

And the beat goes on

Much has changed in the world of technology since MRI was founded, but the important things have stayed the same. Our obsession with client success has been around since day one, and we still strive to amaze our clients and learn from them in our quest for innovation. In the early days, working at MRI felt like being part of a family, and our culture still embodies this today. Even now, MRI employees have opportunities to try new things and explore different roles within the organization.

As MRI continues to grow, our mission to help organizations transform the way communities live, work and play remains at the core of the business. It’s true even after 50 years, and it will remain so 50 years from now. Learn more about who we are.