Real estate has traditionally been a paperwork-intensive industry with many routine yet time-consuming manual processes bogging down productivity. In this digital age, real estate companies are increasingly leveraging emerging technologies to cut costs, enhance efficiency, and boost the customer experience. One such innovative solution gaining widespread adoption is Robotic Process Automation or RPA. It utilizes software robots or ‘bots’ to mimic human actions and take over repetitive tasks previously done by employees.
These digital workers operate 24/7 and can work flawlessly on high-volume tasks much faster than any human employee. RPA bots are being deployed across various real estate functions to streamline operations by automating rule-based activities. This is freeing up employees to focus on more strategic roles. For real estate executives looking to future-proof their business, RPA presents an opportunity to drastically improve turnaround time, reduce overhead costs, and deliver centralized process management at an unmatched scale.
Challenges in the Real Estate Industry
The real estate business has traditionally revolved around extensive paperwork and manual tasks carried out in back offices across various functions. Some of the major challenges include:
- Documentation Handling – Right from lease and property agreements to compliance records, mountains of documents need to be received, organized, processed, and stored daily. This document management consumes a lot of employee hours.
- Data Entry Work – Be it inputting customer details during onboarding, updating property inventories, or filing monthly reports, data entry forms a significant part of daily routine. Errors during manual re-entry of information are also common.
- Tedious Onboarding – The process of screening applicants, collecting paperwork, verifying identities, and setting up accounts for new clients/tenants is lengthy and labor-intensive.
- Contract Processing – Real estate deals involve drafting, examining, and handling many legal contracts that need to be carefully managed within compliance timelines.
- Inefficient workflows – With growing business volumes, existing manual processes struggle to scale. Silos across departments also cause process inefficiencies.
- Rising Costs – The time and effort spent by employees merely executing repetitive paperwork cuts into productivity. It also increases operational expenses for real estate firms.
- Inability to Adapt – Traditional methods hamper quick changes needed to cater to growing customer demands. New business opportunities are difficult to capture owing to rigid workflows.
How RPA Works in the Real Estate Industry
RPA technologies work behind the scenes to automate repetitive tasks across various departments in a real estate organization:
- Seamless Integration – RPA bots can easily connect with existing software platforms used extensively by realtors. This includes ERP systems for financial management, CRM for client relationships, and customer portals for property listings.
- Programmable Software Robots – Bots are trained by IT teams and programmed with step-by-step instructions to perform standardized activities autonomously. Tasks like data extraction, processing, and inputting are handled digitally.
- 24/7 Operations – Once configured, bots can work continuously even when employees are offline. This ensures round-the-clock processing of documents, contracts, and transactions without human supervision.
- Robust Task Automation – Common workflows automated through RPA include document formatting/categorization, form filling, scheduling appointments, generating reports, and responding to basic customer queries through FAQs.
- Increased Accuracy – By reducing manual handling of information, bots eliminate transposition errors and ensure consistency in processes even during peaks. Standard operating procedures are followed error-free.
- Process Optimization – By chaining individual tasks together through digital workflows, overall business operations become streamlined across departments with reduced effort.
- Compliance Assistance – Automating compliance-linked procedures helps track adherence and address deviations through electronic audit trails for improved governance.
Benefits of RPA for Real Estate Organizations
By leveraging software robots to automate repetitive manual work, real estate firms across the globe have reported tremendous results. Some of the key advantages include:
- Increased Productivity – Bots can process high volumes of tasks non-stop without breaks, drastically improving throughput. This allows employees to focus on value-adding activities. Studies show productivity gains of 15-25% on average.
- Reduced Costs – RPA eliminates the expenses associated with manual labor. Cost savings of 30-40% have been achieved commonly. For instance, it reduces documentation handling costs by digitizing storage and retrieval.
- Minimum Errors – As bots follow predefined rules precisely, the chances of human errors made due to fatigue or oversight are almost zero. This enhances output quality and compliance.
- Process Standardization – Automated workflows ensure uniformity is maintained across branches. Digital procedures also promote adherence to industry best practices.
- Scalability – Bots can be deployed on demand within weeks to accommodate temporary or seasonal spikes in workloads. Further bots can be added to existing processes to scale up operations.
- Compliance Support – By automating time-sensitive tasks like filing statutory returns, billing as per agreed schedules, etc., firms avoid compliance lapses. Digital records also help in audits.
- Resource Optimization – Freed-up human staff can be cross-trained or utilized strategically in other critical operations. This improves employee productivity and retention.
- Enhanced Visibility – KPI-based tracking of RPA performance brings transparency. Process bottlenecks are easily identifiable for continuous enhancements.
- Cost Predictability – With clear ROI estimates, operational expenses become more manageable through precise automation cost-benefit planning.
RPA Use Cases in Real Estate
RPA is streamlining a wide range of repetitive workflows across various functions:
Tenant/Customer Onboarding
Bots collect, verify, and update applicant details in CRM systems. They schedule tours, verify income documents, and process applications 24/7 to reduce turnaround time.
Lease Agreement Processing
Robots extract terms from scanned legal documents using OCR technology. Lease details are then directly updated into Property Management Software to issue invoices on time.
Maintenance Requests
Bots prioritize repair jobs, assign tasks to vendors, track status updates, and keep tenants informed through automated communications. This ensures smooth facilities management.
Property Inventory and Billing
RPA maintains centralized inventory records across branches by synchronizing ERP systems hourly. It also generates standardized invoices from templates for property tax, utilities, etc., which can be sent via email.
Banking and Account Reconciliations
Software extracts financial statements from banks’ websites or portals daily. Trial balance reports are generated by cross-verifying entries against General Ledgers to report anomalies.
Invoices and Payments Processing
Bots read paper/email invoices using cognitive capabilities. They extract headers, and line items to update Accounting Software after verifying receipt and due dates against purchase orders. Reminders for payments are automatically scheduled.
Reporting and Compliance
By pulling data from multiple sources, RPA automates monthly/annual financial disclosures, audit documentation, etc. to be filed within compliance timelines without manual intervention.
Marketing and Lead Management
Chatbots engage website visitors proactively to book appointments. They also qualify leads, alert sales teams and update CRM in real time based on predefined business rules.
NAV Calculations
Robots fetch property valuation updates, and debt figures to recalculate crucial Net Asset Value (NAV) metrics and generate investment performance reports for quick decision-making.
Conclusion
RPA is revolutionizing the way the real estate industry conducts business operations. It has enabled companies to derive multiple benefits through increased productivity and reduced costs. Automating repetitive manual tasks using software robots frees human resources to focus on high-value tasks. With the growing acceptance of RPA, more real estate companies are expected to adopt this technology to streamline processes, gain competitive advantage, and deliver superior customer experience. In the coming years, RPA will accelerate digital transformation initiatives of the real estate industry globally.