What Kind of ERP Is the Best Fit for the Real Estate Business?

Enterprise Resource Planning software is known among the business community as a powerful tool for business to induce their productivity and transform their processes. The ERP market has been growing, and now it offers a wide range of different ERP systems, including industry-specific ones.?

As for the real estate industry,?ERP software?may become a game-changer for the business processes of the company and the quality of services provided for property owners and tenants. So, the main question arises: what is the?best real estate ERP software,?and how to choose it? Let’s dive in and describe what features should?ERP software for a real estate company?have to bring maximum value.?

Why Do You Need to Choose a Custom Real Estate ERP?

So, what is the?best real estate ERP software??It’s quite a loaded question, as the market is full of ERP solutions, both universal and designed for real estate companies specifically. At the same time, there is another option: custom development of?real estate?ERP software.

Custom and ready-made solutions have their pros and cons respectively. Let’s compare the main advantages and risks related to each option.

Ready-made solutions

The most popular and common ERP providers include SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft. These companies have a wide range of solutions available, including SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS cloud computing services. Most likely, you will be able to leverage their offers to run your real estate business, as these companies have already generated a strong base for business software.

Despite the visible volumes of the market, ready-made?ERP real estate software?may bring some issues for you.?

• Even choosing ready-made solutions, you will need to allocate an additional budget for its integration. Though you don’t need to hire developers to develop a software piece, you will still need outside involvement from ERP specialists who will set up the system and help you transfer data, so the implementation won’t be instant.
• Nowadays, SaaS solutions offer a lot to businesses. However, they are still designed for a general audience, so the software will fit many businesses. And it’s a catch: a universal solution will cover some of your needs, but it will never be 100% suitable. There will still be some of your business processes that ready-made ERP systems won’t be able to reflect or enhance. As a result, you will be bound to manage them outside the system and lose some opportunities for automation or change them for ERP software, which may be inconvenient.

We will say that ready-made ERP systems may win in the context of price, as you will need to pay a certain amount for integration and then only monthly fees. However, if you need a powerful ERP system that you will use for years, you may find out that the budget for 3 or more years of paying for the ready-made solution will be equal to the cost of custom development. Custom?ERP real estate software?will give you more flexibility than ready-made, and it’s only one benefit you may find.

Custom?ERP real estate software?development

Custom software opens a lot of opportunities for your business, and hence, it might be the?best ERP software for real estate. Basically, you won’t need to adjust your business processes to match the ERP system: it will be designed from the beginning to accommodate your needs.?

Moreover, you won’t be limited in the capacities of the software: the required features, as, for example, a dashboard for tenants and landlords may be included in the scope of work.?

Custom-developed software also means higher cybersecurity and stability. You will be the only company that uses the system, hence, the matter of data security is in your hand and the hands of the development team. You will have more control over what security measures are implemented, how data is stored and protected. The same goes for stability and failure recovery: you can ensure that the system is developed to be stable and withstand required user loads. Unfortunately, with ready-made solutions, you have little control over these aspects.?

Another point you should pay attention to is the scalability of the system. Quite possible, your business will grow over the years, and your ERP system should scale along with it. Instead of moving from one ready-made ERR software to the other, you may start with a pretty basic custom one and add the required capacities over time. It won’t interrupt your business operations and keep the company functioning.

However, the main concern for?custom ERP development?may become price and timeline. In any case, it’s always a big project that demands a lot of resources. However, the outcome is worth it. According to our clients, the ERP development recoups itself in 2-3 years, as the?ERP system implementation?helps to work more productively and generate more profits than without it.?

What ERP do You Need For Your Real Estate Business?

So, what characteristics should a custom?ERP software for a real estate company?have? From our experience, we have gathered the main features and requirements the system should have for seamless and efficient work.

Product Scope for?ERP real estate software

As custom development allows designing any type of system possible, we suggest not only including the modules for company management but additional portals for tenants. It will give them a useful digital experience that will keep them satisfied and simplify the relationships with them for you as a mediator between these two groups.?

So, the main list of features include:

• Leasing: client onboarding, property and retail leasing management, listings management, property maintenance, procurement management, property leasing.
• Accounting: financial management, invoicing, budgeting, employees payment management, fixed asset accounting, investment accounting.
• Procurement: vendor management, inventory management, purchase order, and contract management.
• Maintenance: tasks & ticket management, security day-to-day checklist, property inspections management.
• Communication: communication within the company, project management, correspondence.
• Reporting: financial, rental, compliance, transaction, task, property reports, KPIs.
• Analytics: analytics on different business aspects, forecasting.
• Tenant portal: tenant account, bookings, communication, maintenance requests.
• Advanced features: ePayments, data search, eSignacture, customer loyalty.

We also consider the additional features the real estate company may need, e.g, HR department functionality,?CRM for real estate, proactive maintenance, big data, and predictive forecasting, virtual reality tours of properties, etc.

It’s also important to mention that it’s possible to build a mobile version of your ERP or some modules of it, so its users may benefit from cross-platform system capacities and connect from mobile devices from any part of the world.?

Non-functional requirements (NFRs) for?real estate ERP software

Non-functional requirements are essentially equal to functional ones. While the latest determine the purpose of the software and its role for business, NFRs ensure that the system is viable, is able to operate correctly, and withstand the realistic system loads.?

Here we focus on the next basic NFRs:

• Security: password policy, role permissions, data encryption with AES-256 provided by RDS, WAF and DDOS protection, HTTPS protocol and security headers, use of cookies in a secure mode.
• Performance: auto-scaling if required by using Amazon;
• Maintainability: monitoring and alerting through AWS application insights and log analytics (AWS Cloudwatch); Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) no more than 30 minutes;
• Recovery: backups with an incremental strategy for 30 days; 15 years for archived data.

Correctly written non-functional requirements are key to developing the?best ERP software for real estate.

In Conclusion

As you could have guessed already, in our opinion, the?best real estate ERP software?is a custom-developed system attentively designed by an experienced team of developers. In such conditions, you will be able to obtain the most suitable and convenient?ERP real estate software?for your business.

Develop custom the best real estate ERP software with Altamira.io.

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Read a full version of this article on ERP software for real estate in our blog.