Best Commercial Real Estate Software

Over the last couple of decades, technology has disrupted many traditional industries. The real estate business is one industry where tech laggards have been left behind by their more advanced competitors. The gap between tech adopters and laggards makes it critical for businesses to understand what is commercial real estate software and how it can help their business.

What is the Use of Commercial Real Estate Software?

Real estate businesses encompass multiple functions that require the use of technology to manage these functions. From managing listing, sales, assets, and customers, real estate software helps replace traditional platforms and manual solutions with automated tools and processes.

Commercial real estate software includes CRM tools, asset & property management tools and sales & marketing tools. With the increased demand to create digital experiences and the greater competition in the space, commercial real estate software becomes critical for businesses to stay relevant in the domain.

Features of Commercial Real Estate Software

With the vast number of options available in the market, it is critical to understand what makes good commercial real estate software. The following are key features to help you decide on software to invest in.

1. Robust owner portal

The main target audience of any commercial real estate software is the businesses themselves. Thus, ensuring businesses have a fully functional portal to perform administrative, financial, customer engagement, and marketing functions are critical.

A good owner portal will include multi-user access, well-defined decision trees, and access to a broad classification across customer databases.

2. Convenient and accessible customer portal

While real estate businesses might be the key target market, ensuring that the end consumer has a simple path to make purchases and add to the company’s top-line revenue is critical.

Users should be able to create a profile through simple steps, browse through a catalog of inventory, confirm bookings, sign leases, make online payments through multiple modes, submit maintenance requests, and schedule rent increases.

3. Rich marketing tools

Another key feature businesses should look out for in commercial real estate software is the availability of tools to enhance marketing and outreach.

Businesses should be able to create attractive campaigns based on user subgroups and track the responses and, thereby, the successes of these campaigns. Marketing tools need to be supported by strong user analytics capabilities to provide effective forecasts and campaigns in the future.

4. Administrative tools

Administrative tasks are probably the easiest to automate and have the highest cost-saving potential. Many admin tasks are often manual, and a good real estate commercial software should also have provisions to account for these tasks.

Admin features that one should look out for include customer request tracking, maintenance scheduling, creation of work orders, inspection reports, and photos.

5. Financial tools

Given the traditional nature of the business, another area for dramatic improvement in efficiency is the accounts and finances department. A constantly changing regulatory environment often means recording and re-recording multiple transactions under different books/ledgers.

Automated financial tools can help circumvent this problem. Other important financial features include property ROI and performance calculations, expense tracking, and general ledger analysis.

6. Engaging customer relationship management features

Lastly, probably most important, is the customer relationship management (CRM) feature. CRMs are critical to monitor interactions with the customer, which could result in a better understanding of the current customer base and identify prospective customers.

Key features include automated responses, tagging customer profiles, logging conversations, and customer analytics.

Things To Consider While Purchasing a Commercial Real Estate Software

The features above help us understand what to expect from standard commercial real estate software. The following are key considerations that a user should take into account to make the most of their software before investing in a new solution:

• Easy to use for employees and customers alike

• Seamless integration with your legacy systems

• Active customer support in case of errors or failures

• Ability to scale in size as your business grows

The Final Take on Commercial Real Estate Software

Commercial real estate software helps save businesses a lot of bottom-line costs incurred due to manual labor and associated errors, as well as low-efficiency rates. The various features offered in most software today can play a key role in automating the traditional way of working and help businesses stay afloat and compete in a rapidly changing technology environment.

Commercial real estate software can help businesses gain that extra edge that will enable them to flourish in such an environment.