Real estate businesses are overwhelmed on a daily basis with large amounts of information flows that need to be processed. For example, new leases are drawn up and finalized every week; invoices and entries from contractors and banks are submitted each day. These are all applications of RPA in the real estate sector that are automatable. This demands many time-consuming efforts for simple routine work with little to no exceptions.
Despite this, avoidable, human errors are made daily with potentially major consequences for the course of the business. However, this is one of the biggest pain points within this industry where a strong brand image can provide a huge competitive advantage. After all, when selling a property or handling an incoming complaint, it is extremely important that you can treat your customer with dignity and makes him feel valued. However, this is not easy to achieve if people spend more time on repetitive, administrative tasks than on the customer’s purchase or complaint.
The obvious question now is, “How can I free up more time for my customers?” or in other words, “How do I make administrative processes as efficient as possible?
However, we can easily solve this by deploying software robots. They can exactly mimic human actions at a fraction of the time and costs. This relieves employees of manual, repetitive tasks, freeing up time for what really counts in this industry – human interaction. While you show potential tenants around a house, the lease contract is created by our robot according to your wishes.
To accomplish all this, we make use of RPA or Robotic Process Automation. This technology is fully Python-based and tailor-made. Because manual tasks will be automated from now on. You can count on efficiency gains of 35-50%, savings of up to 25-50% and 100% accuracy. And all that with a return on investment of 6 to 12 months. Sounds almost too good to be true, right? And yet it is true!
The following discusses 6 specific applications of RPA within the real estate market that actually any corporation can benefit from.
1. Creating contracts
2. Registering invoices
At Ad Astra Industries, we not only offer RPA but among others Document Processing. The latter means that we can extract the necessary information from digital invoices. Since you as a syndic, usually work with your regular subcontractors, these invoices are always the same depending on the subcontractor. This enables us to set up the robot in such a way that it extracts the desired information and passes it to your accounting system.
When a trustee gives an order to a contractor to carry out maintenance work, the robot inserts this into the system. When the invoice arrives after a certain period of time, the robot updates the system so that the amount is added automatically. Then the robot completes the necessary bookings after a short check by one of your employees. In the long run this will save you a considerable amount of time and errors.
3. Registering bank transfers
On a weekly basis, syndics are overloaded with bank transactions that need to be entered into the system so that everything is kept up to date. This is very time-consuming and routine work. Therefore, automating this process can save you a lot of time and money without making any mistakes. For example, transfers no longer need to be received by post but can be sent digitally. The robot reads the transfer, it can see which building it is about, which person has paid how much for a certain order. If any exceptions do occur, the robot reports this immediately. This way you can save 75% of your time for this specific labor-intensive process and spend it on other things.
4. Vacancy
The robot collects the final inspection report and compares the information with the company’s database. If the information is correct, the robot terminates the agreement with the utility company just as an employee would. Next, the robot registers the property in the system of the utility company. This process is stored and enters the database.
Vice versa, the robot is also able to sign out an unoccupied property from a utility company. While over-reading the mailbox, the robot can read an email instructing it to unsubscribe from a utility. The robot then navigates to the utility company’s portal and then notifies the property of vacancy. Finally, it archives the withdrawal order.
5. Meter
Every month someone has to record the meter readings in buildings and store them in Excel. This is something our robot cannot do for you. However, instead of doing this, what the robot can do is log into the platform of the energy/water supplier and extract the necessary information from the Excel file where the data was originally recorded. Afterwards, the robot copies and pastes the meter readings from the Excel file to the platform without a single typo.
6. Mailbox
Employees frequently follow certain patterns while reading their mails. For example, different tasks are stored in different folders to maintain an overview. Our robots are capable of distinguishing the mails based on certain criteria. This way, certain tasks, such as rent notices, floor plans and leases, can be proactively archived, started and executed automatically by our robots.
Besides these six specific cases there are many more use cases depending on your business processes, ERP systems and workflows, they will surface naturally during the RPA introduction process.
Feel free to contact us or start a conversation to see how we can relieve your accounting department as much as possible.