Maximizing Efficiency and Profitability: Real Estate Automation Solutions for 2023 and Beyond

Real estate automation is the use of technology to perform real estate tasks and activities. Automated solutions are increasingly being used in the real estate industry to help agents, brokers, and property managers reach their goals faster and more efficiently.

The US real estate market is facing some challenges in 2023 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic impact. But PwC and other domain thought leaders suggest that there are still opportunities for growth and investment in certain sectors, like single-family rental homes, logistics and e-commerce, and affordable housing.

In this scenario, automation can play a vital role in real estate businesses to adapt and thrive in the current market. Automating property management tasks such as rent collection, maintenance requests, and tenant screening can save time and resources for real estate agents and landlords. It also improves data analysis accuracy and speed for decision-making and risk management.

Additionally, automation enhances the customer experience by providing faster and more convenient services, such as virtual property tours and inspections.

What is Real Estate Automation?

Real estate automation is the use of technology to make real estate processes more efficient, reduce costs, and improve customer experience. It streamlines lead management, marketing tasks, and transactions. It also automates customer service tasks such as responding to inquiries, sending updates, and scheduling appointments, allowing agents and brokers to provide better customer service.

Here are some of the benefits of automating real estate:

Automating Real Estate Workflows

If your real estate business is still loyal to the old way of doing things, a lot of your property managers’ time is likely spent on laborious activities such as filling out and filing real estate documents, organizing meetings and emails, overseeing monthly and yearly operations and keeping up with customer databases. The majority of these tasks can be easily optimized with AI, freeing up your team’s valuable time. For instance, an intelligent document management tool can handle the documentation and related activities.

However, before you commit to any kind of automation, it is vital to make sure that your business is ready for it. For example, you cannot proceed to automating your sales and marketing processes, unless your website can handle the additional consumer traffic.

To check if your business is well-positioned for real estate automation, you will need to thoroughly audit your current technology base. If you do not have internal tech expertise for this, you might want to reach out to an external advisor with real estate expertise to have your systems assessed.

If you are sure your systems are ready for real estate automation, here are a few examples of what you can automate:

• Task assignment within the organization: setting deadlines and sending reminders, classifying tasks by contact and workflow, and sharing tasks with other team members.

Every employee should keep a close watch on their tasks and monitor their performance indicators daily with the help of a dashboard. It is also beneficial to integrate the software with Google Calendar, Outlook, or iCalendar to coordinate appointments with customer calendars.

• Document management, e.g., capability of remotely accessing key documents, such as legal documents, licenses, agreements, subcontractor agreements, assessment papers, sales deeds, etc., with the use of real estate software, to manage and access information like property age, location details, floorplans, title deeds, etc. from any place and anytime. Also, it is possible to entrust document management to AI, for instance, the processes of data extraction from document scans, summarization, and automated data entry, like Ascendix did in our AI document processing framework.
• Follow-up reminders to stay on top of key dates and actions. Say, you are a real estate agent, and you have a lead who is currently on a 2-year office lease with another company. Imagine how thoughtful you would look if, 6 months before the lease expiration date, you left just a short note to the client, reminding them about yourself, and 2 months later, sent a meaningful email explaining why your service offering is better. For this, you would need a centralized source of truth like CRM, which will notify you about not only upcoming lease expiration dates but the listing expiration as well.

A situation can be used to illustrate how automation can benefit real estate professionals. Adam, who is in the real estate business with James as his assistant, is overwhelmed with a great many leads. To keep the right balance, he either needs to give up on some leads or sacrifice his other activities, like house tours, in favor of fresh lead management.

This is the solution he comes up with: when a fresh lead is entered into the CRM, a “New Lead” tag is assigned; an automated tinned email is then sent to the lead, asking about their preferences; when they reply to the email, James will make a call to discuss it further; and if James marks the contact as “Qualified,” the task/agreement will be passed to Adam.

In this way, Adam, as a real estate agent, will have more time to research prospects’ details and tastes and ultimately choose better properties for them.

Likely, you have already surmised that automation is the key to increasing the size of your real estate business. The only method to be successful in the virtual world as a real estate agent is by automating your daily duties, or at least some part of them.

5 Ways to Automate Your Real Estate Business

If you have arrived at a conclusion that automation would work for your business, let’s move on and take a closer look at how to do it.

User Experience

With the accelerated rate of technological progress, customers today tend to investigate the web extensively before they commit to a purchase. It is essential to recognize that having a strong website is essential to succeeding in the congested and competitive market. Clients, however, are looking for brands that go the extra mile to provide their customers with a pleasant experience.

To gain a competitive advantage, you should aim for engaging and consistent interactions that make your customers yearn for more. You could automate the user experience by using high-quality photos, allowing customers to submit their documentation online, creating an interactive property floor plan, constructing virtual tours, and ensuring real-time communication between customers and managers.

Solutions real estate agents could use to automate their UX:

Accounting, invoicing, and finance

Establishing a centralized system for your admin tasks in accounting and finance would allow you to complete payments, run financial analytics, and bill your jobs from the convenience of your desk. Automation of financial management also helps to supervise, approve, follow orders, and pay the suppliers, guaranteeing every individual is linked to their respective invoices.

Solutions real estate agents could use to automate their finance, accounting & invoicing:

Sales and Marketing

Realtors have a lot of responsibilities, ranging from handling client information databases to dealing with extended sales cycles. For them to effectively increase their conversion rates, they need to get their business out there. While agents will still need to communicate with their customers face-to-face to close a deal, there are plenty of sales and marketing activities that could be automated to make their jobs simpler.

Automation can help them to centralize data about their prospects, categorize clients into groups by specific criteria, store each customer’s communication history to offer more individualized service, and send out personalized marketing emails and messages. Research has shown that automating marketing procedures can boost conversion rates by around 53%.

Solutions real estate agents could use to automate their sales & marketing:

Property Management

Managing property can be very demanding, with tasks such as keeping track of various properties, making sure maintenance is completed on time and within budget, having conversations with customers, and working with other project directors. It is difficult to envision a property business being able to perform all these activities without the help of real estate automation.

It would be beneficial to invest in proptech tools, for example, a tailored property management system that would allow for automated listing posting & updating maintenance, scheduling and billing, rent collection, etc. This is how you could improve your property management:

Field Inspection and Real Estate Appraisals

Realtors need to perform high-quality evaluations to guarantee the property is in great condition and that the appropriate systems are in place. On the other hand, real estate appraisals can help agents obtain the best value for the home. If customers assume the home inspection is not up to the requirements, they could call off the agreement and search elsewhere.

You can simplify things for yourself and your customers by automating duties such as producing reports, making online templates and checklists, and arranging appraisal inspections in advance. Clients can also make online appointments instead of visiting your office in person.

What real estate agents should use:

Ascendix as a Technology Partner for Real Estate Companies

Are you a real estate company looking for a technology partner to help you with automation solutions? Look no further than Ascendix!

Ascendix is a leading technology partner for real estate companies, offering a comprehensive suite of services, like custom real estate CRM development, Salesforce consulting, and legacy software modernization.

Why choose Ascendix as a real estate software development partner?

• We’ve been in real estate for 16+ years;
• We’re both technology service providers and product owners with 17 products on portfolio. We know what it takes to build a one-stop digital solution that encompasses functionality tailored specifically for your business operations;
• We’ve been building real estate tech solutions for years. Hence, we know how to audit your current software and customize it. We can also build and test an MVP solution and help you migrate to the cloud;
• Ascendix has 5 offices in US and Europe, a feature that will save you costs;
• The world’s most prominent real estate companies – JLL and Colliers International – have been relying on our real estate development services to automate inhouse operations for more than a decade now. Check their success stories on our portfolio.

So why wait? Contact Ascendix today to learn more about how we can help you with your real estate automation requirements!