Willmotts seek out ‘game-changing’ property management software
Award-winning property services company Willmotts was established during 1856 in West London. Today, they provide complete property services from their Hammersmith base, focussed on delivering professional services to their clients. Willmotts impressively cover all aspects of residential & commercial property management including Acquiring, Sales and Lettings, Investment and Development, Formal Valuations, Lease & Enfranchisement, Block Management & Property Services.
Willmotts qualified specialist teams work closely together on projects across the UK, ensuring all their clients benefit from their vast experience and expertise.
The Business Challenge
Willmotts were using a privately developed bespoke system, which needed time and resource to develop and operate. With vast portfolios and varying client requirements, they needed a solution that was far more up to date and could cater to serving most parts of their property management business.
Over the last three years, we’ve known that we’ve needed to change systems as we have far too many manual processes and reliance on excel. The industry is moving faster and faster and with more legislation there is more potential to encounter pitfalls. So, we needed a solution that is doing the thinking for us.
Jim Jenkins, Finance Director at Willmotts
With 250 blocks and over 3,000 units under management, all 46 employees of Willmotts would need to interact with the new system to some degree or another. Jim saw many super-users within the team that would need to interact with the software daily, this included the accounts teams and dedicated client account members. Others would still be interacting daily but only needing read-only access.
The solution
Willmotts tried to bridge the gaps with their current bespoke system but it didn’t quite work. Then with COVID, it became quite a challenging time to change systems. When three alternative options were finally shortlisted, Willmotts were impressed with MRI Qube Property Management from the initial demonstration.
A market-leading property management solution in the UK, Qube powers over 1.5 million units across 500 clients. It offers advanced property accounting tools, industry-renowned service charge management software and a comprehensive mixed-use property management database. Qube has constantly evolved and moved forward with the market, with focus on a cloud-first approach and enabling mobile or remote teams to work effectively without experiencing any barriers to the solution.
It’s fantastic to see that some of the things that we’ve had to spend so much time on will just be automated in Qube. Client reporting at quarter end will be a lot quicker, so will the service charge reporting in our block management department.
Jim Jenkins, Finance Director at Willmotts
Stand out features
Willmotts saw the front-end features of Qube as a major stand-out, with levels of personalisation and the ability to drill down and manipulate unit information on-site. The Manager Hub feature will allow property managers on-the-go to access all the information they need from Qube, search the entire database, answer queries quickly and raise tasks. “Just everything, really everything about it just looks fantastic. The visuals are certainly the thing that caught everybody’s attention”.
Our bespoke system was never going to be cloud-based or accessible on mobile devices, so Manager Hub delivering that will be a game changer for us.
Jim Jenkins, Finance Director at Willmotts
Experience so far and what’s next?
From initial demo and subsequent meetings between Willmotts and MRI, the whole process took around 3 months.
The MRI team have been fantastic, very knowledgeable and always accessible. If I’ve emailed, I get a response. We’ve had numerous Teams calls and we appreciate that the team came in to see us in person multiple times during the process.
Jim Jenkins, Finance Director at Willmotts
With two distinct management portfolios, Willmotts are looking to migrate the first one from October 2023 and the second from January 2024. Willmotts also have in-depth training from MRI to ensure all staff can optimise the solution to its best use. “Most of our people here are very experienced with systems and all the things that come with property services. What’s good is that there is a lot of training on offer, but our teams will be quite efficient in this area”.
Daniel Koenig, Account Executive at MRI Software commented; “We’d like to thank Jim and the team at Willmotts for choosing MRI as their technology partner. We have great confidence that Qube Property Management will bring incredible efficiencies to the business, from simple automated tasks that were previously done manually, to driving overall smarter business operations. Our focus now moves to project management stepping in to execute the implementation phases to Willmotts required timeframes.”
