Property Management Automation Case Study: Calson Properties

Challenges

Ascendix: What obstacle or problem were you facing that led you to seek solutions for Commercial or Residential real estate Property Management?

Jordan: Our biggest need was a solution to consolidate information from various team members and platforms and bring it to a central location.

We had recently had a team member retire, and the subsequent restructuring of responsibilities had team members dispersed in different parts of the country.

This required more organization, transparency, and communication across our company, which ultimately generates more efficiency, such as no longer asking questions like, “Do you have the contact information for the new flooring vendor?”

We also needed a central tool to manage more information on the properties and tenants, such as vendor contracts, certificates of insurance, as well as tenant data.

We were using a common property management/accounting software but it had limitations on custom fields and was cumbersome in so many areas.

For example, contact management was extremely difficult and did not flow to our maintenance technicians’ native phone apps, making them frustrated.

Mass emails to all tenants at a property were also limited.

We also wanted something that would be flexible to adapt to new business processes.

Solution

Ascendix: What solutions did you research and how did you end up selecting AscendixRE on the Salesforce platform?

Jordan: We reviewed various property management and accounting solutions, but they were all restrictive in some sense.

Some were weak on task/work order management, others were weak on accounting, others were cost-prohibitive.

We also looked at Zoho and a custom-built Podio installation.

We considered building our own Salesforce implementation as well, but the full scope of that was daunting and cost-prohibitive for our little operation.

Ascendix had 80% of what we wanted out of the box and they were great in designing and building out the remaining 20%. 

Ascendix: Describe how selecting Ascendix as a partner to implement both CRM and advise on your customized business process has improved efficiency, transparency, organization etc for Calson?

Jordan: Ascendix has been a fantastic partner through this process.  Their team is extremely knowledgeable about the Salesforce platform and always works to find the best solution.

I love that they take the time to understand the business application and try to mold the software to fit us, rather than changing how we operate to fit the parameters of our property management software (which other software tends to do).

They are creative in finding solutions to the unique problems we present.  Problems of the past, such as contact management and mass emails no longer plague us.

Ascendix: What are some of your favorite features of the platform?

Jordan: Having all of our information in one place is fantastic.

We still use a management/accounting software but are essentially running updates into our AscendixRE database on a weekly basis as we can do so much more in AscendixRE than the other software.

Since we use the platform as a service delivery mechanism rather than sales, organizing tasks is important to us.

Being able to quickly see the status of others’ projects is extremely helpful.

We are starting to use more automation as well, such as automatic emails based on trigger dates, which opens up a tremendous amount of potential efficiencies.

Ascendix: What’s the 2020 plan for Calson Properties?

Jordan: We want to continue to streamline our operations through automation. We aim to track all available information in AscendixRE rather than in separate spreadsheets, or worse, just in our heads!

As we do that, our team members will have more time for maximizing our revenue and reducing property expenses.