The story of Ristic Real Estate is a story of family. What began with the four Ristic family members – Mills, Fusun, Kaan and Melodi (Brown) – working from their Epping home back in 2003 has, over the last 15 years, expanded into a business that’s now bursting at the seams.
“We recently moved into a bigger office because we outgrew our previous place,” says Melodi Brown, Accounts Manager of Ristic Real Estate, with a laugh.
While there’s no doubt that Ristic is now more than simply a small family real estate business, this sense of closeness and community has remained at the forefront of the company’s ethos. With 14 staff members and a property management team looking after close to 700 properties, Ristic acknowledges that its thriving business needed a modern solution that will meet the needs of both its team and its customers.
A cloud-based property management software proved to be ideal, but the move, as Ristic experienced was not without its challenges. Thankfully, MRI stepped in and helped them make a smooth transition.
Let’s take a look at Ristic RE’s journey to the cloud and how MRI has saved its business with MRI Property Tree.
MRI and Ristic RE
After initially signing up with MRI, the team at Ristic made the decision to switch to a competitor earlier this year. Brown, who uses the software extensively, speaks about the topic with passion and experience.
“We chose MRI because it was a modern software system, simple to use and easy to integrate,” she says. But once the business went over 500 properties, they decided to upgrade to a cloud-based system. As Brown says, they learned the hard way and lasted just over a month before switching back.
“We made the mistake of trying out a competitor instead of moving straight to MRI Property Tree, and, I have to admit, it was a massive fail.”
Award-winning support team
Ristic RE easily recognised that MRI’s unrivalled customer service was what’s missing when they switched to another software provider.
“The biggest issue we found was the support. Coming from MRI, where we had fantastic support in place, we found ourselves working with a company where we couldn’t call anyone if we had an issue.”
MRI’s award-winning support team came to the rescue and helped Ristic RE move over to MRI Property Tree in April of this year. And ever since, Ristic RE never looked back. “MRI stepped in and they basically saved us.”
Convenience of cloud-based technology
MRI Property Tree’s cloud-based technology opened a lot of possibilities for the team at Ristic RE.
For property managers, being able to utilise MRI Property Tree anytime and anywhere is a massive benefit when they are on the road, meeting customers and checking properties. The client portals also allow the team to provide better service to their clients. “A lot of the owners are logging in and retrieving their own statements, financial graphs and maintenance requests and they could also contact us via the portal.
“Cloud-based has been so much better for us as a business because we can access everything we need from wherever we are in the world. I was in Fiji earlier this year and suddenly had to do something for a client and it was easy. It’s great because not only can we now work on the move, it also means I don’t have to time my holidays around certain work dates – I can go on holiday at any time of the month!”
About Ristic Real Estate
Ristic Real Estate is an independent ’boutique’ real estate agency located in Melbourne’s North. For more information, visit Ristic Real Estate
