Long Harbour’s continued BTR expansion is supported by MRI Software
Long Harbour, a specialist real estate investment, development and management firm, has utilised the capabilities of MRI Qube Property Management for over 12 years to manage their Build to Rent (BTR) portfolio, which includes over 1,500 apartments and houses in the UK, totalling over £450m of assets.
As an early entrant into the market, Long Harbour is now recognised as one of the leading multifamily investors with full in-house capabilities as investor, developer and operator.
All properties are managed by Way of Life, an award-winning consumer-facing BTR brand, operating platform and consultancy, which manages seven developments, with a focus on delivering best-in-class customer service.
Now at an exciting phase of its growth, Long Harbour is looking to emulate the success of its BTR business with a new dedicated single-family investment vehicle which is designed to provide high-quality and energy efficient suburban rental family housing at scale.
Long Harbour began using MRI real estate investment and management software in July 2010 to support its Secured Income portfolio. As a leading property management solution for many other freehold owners and leasehold managing agents, it was a natural fit for the business. Since then, the solution has been widely adopted across Long Harbour, expanding to support Way of Life with its property management and accounting functions since its entry to market in 2013.
Ruchit Gupta-Chaudhary, Director of Technology and Data at Long Harbour explains
Having a common solution across the group has helped us significantly, as we have an overlap of knowledge and capabilities.
As an innovative and dynamic business, Long Harbour enjoys the freedom to choose best-fit solutions where possible, but with the flexibility to integrate other in-house solutions for functions like leasing and aggregated reporting across group systems. MRI’s open and connected platform means clients can create a unique technology ecosystem with their preferred market-leading solutions. Gupta-Chaudhary adds,
MRI have been very supportive in extending their API capabilities to suit our needs. Through integration we have been able to streamline processes while maintaining a best-of-breed approach.
Qube offers system integration with numerous industry partners and on a day-to-day basis, a benefit is its property finance management functionality which is a fundamental part of Long Harbour’s operations. According to Gupta-Chaudhary,
Qube manages our core property and financial dataset, it’s our single source of truth that our finance teams rely on. Smooth running of our finance operations is critical, with all our transactions running through the Qube system. If P&Ls don’t reconcile, then there’s little point doing anything else. Long Harbour is a very innovative organisation developing our own tech at a very fast pace. MRI has been a fundamental partner in that journey and their system is well designed with enough flexibility that it can be tailored to our specific needs and processes
Long Harbour will continue to stay on the pulse of new technologies, with other projects in the pipeline including the adoption of smart building and IoT technologies, as well automation for sustainability reporting. The business also looks forward to strengthening our relationship with MRI Software, as the leading residential property management software in the UK. It is used to manage the financials for over 1.5 million residential units including over 20,000 BTR units across multi and single-family tenures.
