October 11th, 2019
Case Study: Location Property Group
Case Studies
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Known for his market knowledge and personable demeanour, Luke O’Kelly has dedicated the past 12 years of his 15 year real estate career to building the Ray White West End office. Here’s his PropertyMe customer story:
Hi, can you tell us a little more about yourself and Ray White West End?
I’m Luke O’Kelly, principal at Ray White West End in Queensland. We’re a residential sales and property management business and have been operating for about 12 years.
What problems did you have with your property management software prior to joining PropertyMe?
We had been using our previous server-based property management software for 10 or 11 years and one of our biggest costs was around server maintenance and upkeep.
The lack of development was quite frustrating and being a server-based product, you didn’t get the automation that came along. Plus, whenever you did want changes or upgrades, it was a very slow process.
What was the transition to PropertyMe like?
When we made the decision to make the move to PropertyMe, we did quite a few test uploads of all our data to make sure that the data was transitioned right. If there were any corrections that needed to be made, it was made in a test format.
We made the transition just over the end of financial year. We did our end of month and end of year on the 30th of June. That weekend happened to be a Saturday so once we completed that and disbursed our owners, we contacted PropertyMe and they facilitated the transfer across. Over that weekend, all our data migrated into their cloud software and as of Monday, our property managers were up and running.
How has PropertyMe changed the way you do things at Ray White West End?
One of the big things about making the move to PropertyMe was the time efficiency that we gained. We estimate that we save about 1.5 hours per person per day. If you extrapolate that out per week and then per month, we’re gaining somewhere between 38 to 40 hours a week and then 120 hours a month.
Time-saving automation
The fantastic thing about PropertyMe is the automation. So when you generate a lease, the email automatically gets attached to it and you can send it out in one big swoop. Same around arrears management. It automatically drafts the breach notices and the text messages that go along with that.
Owner and Tenant Access
Instead of having to call our office for something relatively straightforward, owners and tenants can go online and have a look at their statements, rent payments, maintenance, inspection reports and it’s all in one cloud-based platform. It allows us to spend more time on the phone with clients and tenants, on more important matters like building relationships.
Mobile app
When we made the move to PropertyMe, all our property managers installed the app on their phone, which gives them immediate access to all the information that they need such as tenant information around inspections, routine reports, but also simple things like contact information.
It allows them to have everything on their phone for ease of access, not having to come back to the office to look for bits and pieces, and they can edit it as well. It’s not just a one-way feed – if you make a change on the app, it feeds through to the backend as well, which is fantastic.
Centralised communications
One of the great features about the communication and automated emails in PropertyMe is how simply it works. You receipt rent, the tenant automatically gets a receipt. You do a lease renewal, the email automatically gets generated with the lease attached.
Additionally, PropertyMe has an inbox – it has all the tenants and landlords’ communications in one lot. And that way, it’s also attached to the file. So you’re not having to go back to your Gmail account or anything like that to find information.
The amount of time-saving in automatically templating every response that goes out allows us to work quicker, it’s a lot simpler and it’s a unified format for the information that goes out.
Would you recommend PropertyMe to others?
I definitely recommend PropertyMe to anyone in the real estate industry. We’ve basically drank the Kool-Aid and we’re massive PropertyMe advocates. It’s been one of those platforms that we should have moved to earlier, and when we made the change, it’s only been fantastic.
Watch the full PropertyMe Customer Story below:
Thanks for reading! PropertyMe is Australia and New Zealand’s largest and most complete cloud property management software. Book a free demo today to see why thousands have switched.
Did we miss anything in PropertyMe Customer Story: Ray White West End? Please email [email protected] to let us know.
