It‘s often said that the real estate sector is resistant to change and slow to adopt new technologies, however, in our experience this is not true. Most real estate companies actively want to use technology to enhance their portfolios but finding the right software that meets all their requirements is a challenge – primarily because, in most cases, such a solution just doesn’t exist (and not even close!).

Real estate is complex, and has many many variations around contract terms, property types, laws, taxes, materials, individual company processes, etc and needs to cover many many different areas (finance, maintenance, tenant experience, contracts, and so on), not to mention across different countries, currencies, and languages. With all these variations developing software that is flexible and detailed enough to cover many real life scenarios is incredibly difficult, and no software company currently comes close to handling all of this. So property companies have to compromise, but on which part to do so is a difficult decision, especially when such software systems are often a fundamental and integral part of the operations of the business – so it‘s vital that a carefully considered decision is made (furthermore the cost in time/hassle to start using a new system, or change systems, is often not insignificant).

Proptech companies often fall into one of the following categories, based on the strategies they employ:

  1. Highly specialised in one area (eg inspections or tenant experience) – often such tools are good enough to be useful, but no company wants to use many different systems and have unitegrated data all over the place, so they are typically used only in the most important areas for that particular business.
  2. Many itegrations but weak core – often such tools don’t provide great functionality but try to overcome it by integrating with many other useful systems. Sometimes this can work, but mostly it does not and is often not a great long term strategy.
  3. Try to cover everything but not in too much detail – a common strategy, such companies try to add lots of functionality quickly to satisfy market demands but often struggle to cover many real world scenarios (or have many bugs or limitations), so clients are often limited to what they can do and further upgrades to existing functionality is often slow/difficult.
  4. Try to cover everything in detail – this is very difficult, and often means some functionality is missing compared to option 3, but what exists works well and it‘s a question if the client is patient enough to wait for further upgrades or can use an alternative (eg option 1 or spreadsheet) in the meantime.

Rentflow falls into category 4. We have the advantage of continually improving the software since 2010 (compared to many new start ups who add functionality „quickly“) and are focussed on high quality implementations, but lack some features (all systems lack features its just a question of how many).

There is also a huge difference in usefulness between a feature that has taken 1 month to code and then same one that took 6 months. Features implemented „quickly“ often have bugs, are hard to upgrade, don’t cover all real world client needs, and are generally lacking in the areas of security and/or performance.

Rentflow can help you in the decision making process, please contact us for more information.