Before Savills Ireland found Ascendix Technologies, they were looking for a scalable and flexible commercial real estate CRM with a map search integration. We had an interview with a Business Analyst at Savills Ireland, Cormac O’Reilly, who kindly agreed to answer several questions below about Savills Ireland, the future of the commercial real estate industry, and to share his feedback of Ascendix Search.
Meet Cormac O’Reilly and Savills Ireland
Cormac O’Reilly is a Business Analyst at Savills Ireland and Salesforce Certified Platform Developer I.
Savills is a global commercial, residential, and rural real estate service provider. The company offers a wide range of specialist services from sale, acquisition, and investment advice to valuation, planning, and property management. Savills Ireland has been at the forefront of the Irish Property market for more than 50 years and has been using the Ascendix Search app for about a year.
Solutions that were offered by Ascendix to Savills Ireland:
- AscendixRE CRM for Salesforce, for commercial real estate needs
- Ascendix Search app
- Salesforce customization services
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Company Name |
Savills |
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Location |
Ireland, Dublin |
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Company Website |
https://www.savills.ie/ |
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Number of Employees (Office in Ireland) |
250 |
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Industry |
Commercial Real Estate |
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Company Representative’s Name and Job Position |
Cormac O’Reilly (Business Analyst) |
Ascendix: Please tell us about Savills’ history, its size, and the industry it operates in. A general portrait of your company.
Cormac: I work for Savills in Ireland. They are part of a larger Savills group. And there are maybe 250 people in Ireland. Globally, I suppose 30, 000 staff. But each country operates independently.
And that’s kind of a very high-level overview. Savills is mainly based on commercial properties. That is why we started using Ascendix for commercial property.
The Homepage of Savills
Ascendix: What are your core business values, what are you focusing on?
Cormac: All commercial sectors: development, land, retail, hotels, offices, investment properties. And just a small residential practice focusing on country homes, more expensive residential property. There is a large property management section as well. And other services such as valuations were introduced. So it is a broad spectrum of commercial properties.
Ascendix: How long have you been in your job position?
Cormac: Two years.
Commercial Real Estate Expert about the Future of the Industry
Ascendix: What do you think are the most challenging aspects of your business, especially, nowadays in terms of COVID -19 situation?
Cormac: There are a lot of things up in the air at the minute. And we are not sure what is going to happen. I do not know what the reaction is like in other countries, but certainly, in Ireland, it is very much a wait and kind of game we are playing at the minute.
We had quite a big recession here maybe 10 years ago that we still have not fully recovered from. Brexit is also a large influence on things here as well. It was our initial concern coming into play this year. And then it was COVID-19. So, there’s potential for a double recession too.
Ascendix: How are you going to cope with these challenges and with this situation?
Cormac: Savills’ in Ireland general idea is when the transactional business like office leasing, office sales, that kind of business slows down that the property management team will keep the lights on, keep the business running. So, for the last couple of months, when we went into lockdown, the property management team has been quite busy dealing with offices, shopping centers, buildings that have been closed.
Ascendix: As an expert in the commercial real estate industry, how do you see the future of your industry? Probably, something will develop, something will disappear. What are your prospects?
Cormac: It is a difficult time to answer that question. Because it could be an argument both ways. Office space can be in big demand, there could be an increase because people get fed up working from home. We do not know what is going to happen. Currently, in our own building at the minute, they are just trying to make it over so that people have the right distance apart and space margin.
No doubt, it is going to be a big challenge to redesign old buildings and new buildings to specifications and to change how they are designed and laid out. And all that kind of talk from a residential property perspective.
I think the specification would change as well. I would imagine property prices, building prices will probably go up. I assume that people’s salaries will drop because of COVID-19 and fewer people could afford houses. A lot of unknowns again.
Savills Ireland about AscendixRE and Ascendix Search
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Ascendix Search Use |
1 Year |
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Pros of Ascendix Search |
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The Most Useful Features/Entities |
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| Introduced Custom Features |
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Apps from AppExchange and Other Salesforce Products |
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Ascendix: How long have you been using Ascendix Search?
Cormac: Just over a year. I think a year, this month or last month since we have signed up for Ascendix.
Challenges
Ascendix: And before you found Ascendix Technologies, what internal challenges had you had in your company regarding getting your data information set up, about searching anything? What were the main difficulties?
Cormac: Before we came across Ascendix, we had been using a local provider in Ireland. So up to that point, everything had just been sorted in silos of each compartment and stored in Excel files.
There was no sharing of data across departments. And we soon realized that it was based on a platform license and a very low-scale company. We could not tailor it the way we needed to fit across different aims and let teams use it in different ways. Like, we are all a part of one company, but each team operates in very different ways.
That was something we realized very quickly with our provider that we were not going to be able to have a “one size fits for all” of us. We needed something with more scope that is why we came across Ascendix.
Ascendix: If we compare Salesforce General Search with Ascendix Search. What was lacking in the Salesforce General Search?
Cormac: There are a number of things. Certainly, I was looking for comparable data, the best ability to search on a map, and being able to draw on a map, that kind of optionalities. A huge draw for Ascendix Search is the flexibility to change fields that you search on, put necessary columns quickly as well to be able to put them into PDF or Excel reports, and format those. There are a lot of benefits to Ascendix Search over normal Salesforce search.
Ascendix: And if we speak about the period when you were choosing the services that could provide the same advanced search option. I am sure you had several offers on the plate besides Ascendix. So why did you resort to Ascendix Technologies?
Cormac: Basically, Ascendix seemed like the best fish. There was a lot of functionality, for example, to be able to search on a map was one of our key requirements. We just had to draw a circle and could find everything in a radius, that kind of stuff.
And there was one of the key things we have been looking for − a comparable database. So, AscendixRE was by far the clear favorite basing. It was so awesome, really a close second.
AscendixRE and Ascendix Search Solutions
Ascendix: And what are the most useful features, tools, and functions that you use? Probably, it is an “export to Excel” feature, or mass actions, or a map search. What are the most useful functions for you that helped Savills to succeed?
Cormac: Map search is definitely a useful function. Just searching in general. It is massively cutting down the time it takes an agent to look for comparable data. We are finding that cleaning up our data, managing our data is quite a big job. Generally, searching for data and using the map are the most useful features.
Ascendix: What are the most important features in a map search for you?
Cormac: I guess the ability to filter on the maps, sort the shapes. One thing that I do not think we can do in Google Maps, but we can do it in OpenStreetMap. When you draw a circle, you can draw a circle with a specific radius, which you can only do in OpenStreetMap. In Google Street Map you can look at units and then you can drop them on the street view.
Ascendix: Do you use these custom pins on a map?
Cormac: We have set it up for properties. I imagine it would be something that we start using more and more. But for now, they just do not own property based on the different record types. I do not use it for anything else.
Ascendix: How often do you use saved searches? I mean, the ones you have already used. Are they useful for you? And does it help you to increase the productivity of your work?
Cormac: I would use quite a bit to save searches. I am quite familiar. It is a good learning curve. Some people started using the system first as quite a learning curve there and figuring out that they must save to search for themselves and share the parameters with some people. It is a good way for the researchers to start on the predefined form.
Ascendix: What are your most frequently used parameters and operators in Ascendix Search?
Cormac: Lease events is a big one. Unit sizes is quite a big thing as well. For a lease quarter, it is a type of a lease that is, for example, a fashion unit, retail, food, or beverage. Things when you compare one shopping center to see what gaps there are for different types of units. Rental values, values, sale dates. Market localities to view the conditions as well.
Ascendix: Do you use mass actions like mass email, mass follow up?
Cormac: Not directly. We have a marketing team. They just print out the list, search for lists and inquiries, something that matches. They make a targeted standard e-mail list and Excel lists.
Ascendix: Did you introduce any custom features to your Ascendix Search? If yes, what are they?
Cormac: Yes, we have created some custom objects like Process Builders. I think there are some other apps we have installed.
The biggest change is on our lease records. This is just an example of a lease record.
We have created a NOTOR object called a lease event that is linked to a lease. It just shows important events in the lease or lease commencement expiration dates. We created a little visual Salesforce table that will show the lease events in chronological order. And there will not be any changes in the rent values. Our idea for doing this is that we have teams that would do a lot of work around rent views. And they wanted to be able to search for specific events as part of the lease.
This was something that allowed us to do that. We can search for a lease or lease event using these tools and search. They covered all our boxes in that regard. And that is probably the biggest change that we made to the standard functionality of AscendixRE.
Ascendix: What other apps from AppExchange did you use to make your work more efficient?
Cormac: We installed Lightning Sharing. This is something that Chris Peterson (Senior Salesforce Consultant at Ascendix Technologies) recommended for sharing products, I believe you have already created your own solution in Ascendix Search. Rollup Helper. I do not think we use it for anything. I think I was using it at one stage for a rolling up. We figured out a new way of doing it.
DatatableFSC was something that we do not use. Anyone who uses AscendixRE does not use it. It uses a different part of our company where we have bought some platform licenses for a property management team.
We use Tableau to link a shopping center, a floor plan to Ascendix Search. We linked lease information to the floor plan so that people can see. We are still in the process of setting this up.
The Payoff
Ascendix: And have all the changes and the introduction of Ascendix Search reflected on your productivity? Did it help you to save money or save more time for calling? Have you measured it?
Cormac: To give an example, a colleague of mine last week was looking for all the shopping centers around in Dublin. He was looking for all food and beverage units in shopping centers. So, he was saying that previously it would have taken maybe four hours to go through and look through every Excel file and put the information together. Then check and make sure it was up to date, whereas it took him 10 minutes to do it in Ascendix Search. So that is just one example of something where it has been a massive timesaver.
Savill’s Digital Optimization Plans
Ascendix: Considering your experience with Ascendix Technologies and with data readjustment. Are you going to continue with further digital optimization in your company? And if yes, how are you going to do this?
Cormac: I would imagine we will. I guess our goal at the minute is to get everyone up and fully functional on AscendixRE because some teams are a lot further along than others. We have an old legacy system, Microsoft CRM for reporting all our fees and instructions and stuff like that. The idea is that we can get to a point where we record all that information in AscendixRE, and then we do a mass upload it towards the CRM system once a month.
For just creating reports, downloading, and uploading to be in our system. That is something that we are working on to manage.
Key Takeaway
You may see from the story of Savills Ireland, that flexibility and multi-functionality are the key things in commercial real estate CRM. Effectiveness and simplicity of the right CRM system will be paid off not only in terms of money but also in terms of time that you can dedicate to the business development to stand out from your competitors.
But if you have your own set of requirements for the Salesforce or Dynamics 365 CRM systems and would like to customize them to have a more competitive position on the market, look for a development partner with CRM expertise.
For more than 20 years, we’ve been offering CRM consulting and development solutions for different verticals including commercial real estate, finance, insurance, industrial manufacturing, etc. and will be happy to create you the most cost-effective CRM software.
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