ERP for real estate: features, integrations & best platforms
November 8, 2023
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Head of Itransition's ERP Center of Excellence
ERP for real estate helps building and construction service providers, agents, and brokers centralize their operational data and manage day-to-day business activities and processes in real estate development, marketing and sales, tenant and property management, finance and accounting.
With 25+ years in enterprise software engineering, Itransition delivers custom and platform-based enterprise resource planning solutions for the real estate industry. We meet the most deliberate business needs of our clients and accelerate their digital transformation.
About Itransition
10+ years in ERP service provision
50+ completed projects of different scales across industries
Hands-on expertise in delivering out-of-the-box, custom, and hybrid ERP solutions
An Odoo Silver Partner
A NetSuite Solution Provider
Client spotlight
Looking for a trustworthy technology partner for your ERP project?
Real estate ERP functionality
Itransition delivers tailored modular-based ERP solutions to streamline every aspect of your business, including:
Construction management
Automating pre-development, construction, and post-development workflows to improve construction project planning, coordination, and control to ensure profitability and growth.
- Project management (project budgeting, estimation, planning, resource allocation, issue tracking and mitigation, team management, risk management, and time tracking)
- Contractor and subcontractor management (registration, quotation management, work orders/change work orders creation and tracking, performance assessment, billing, and payment tracking)
- Inventory and warehouse management (inventory tracking, material flow management, inventory planning)
- Supplier management (supplier performance tracking and assessment, supplier document management, risk mitigation)
- Accounting and finance (project financial health assessment, purchase orders (materials, equipment, and suppliers) tracking, invoicing, general ledger, payroll and billing, tax and compliance management)
- Bidding
- Document management
Marketing automation
Automating day-to-day marketing activities and streamlining the creation of targeted campaigns for prospects across all channels to pursue a more efficient and personalized customer experience.
- Prospect information collection and storage
- Listing management
- Campaign building (Email, SMS, social marketing, and digital marketing)
- Automated follow-up
- A/B testing
- SEO and content management
- Lead management
- Pricing automation
- Marketing campaign lifecycle monitoring and analysis (ties to revenue, ROI)
- Portfolio management
Sales management
Automating sales activities for real estate agents, agencies, and brokers to reduce costs and resources spent on property hunting, speed up response rates, achieve a higher close rate on conversions and referrals, and improve client satisfaction.
- Consolidated view of prospects, leads, and customers (contact details, purchase history, communication preferences, referrals)
- Property showings and open house events scheduling and supervision
- Virtual media tours
- Appraisals and inspections coordination
- Lead management (lead scoring and grading, automated behavior tracking)
- Document management (offers, contracts, and closing statements)
- Contract management (segmenting and categorizing contracts, type of lead, referral status, purchase history, and communication preferences)
- Invoicing and transaction management
- Reporting and analytics (agent performance, sales, leads utilization)
Tenant management
Automating the day-to-day activities of property owners, managers, and landlords, including tenant screening, acquisition and management, lease and rent tracking, and finance management to streamline leasing workflows, as well as understand and predict occupancy rates.
- Applicant screening
- Tenant management
- Rent and deposit payment processing
- Accounting and financial management
- Document management (lease agreements, official notices, complaints)
- Lease tracking (sign date, start date, termination date, lease terms, renewal deadlines)
- Analytics and reporting (lease activities effectiveness, rent schedules, occupancy rates, and costs)
- Self-set alerts and notifications
- Compliance with accounting standards
User portal
Ensuring smooth communication between tenants, landlords, property owners, visitors, and maintenance workers, enabling seamless data access, input, and modification to increase resident satisfaction, simplify rent collection, and streamline maintenance activities.
- Maintenance, repair, move, and reservation requests submission
- Work order progress monitoring
- Automated notifications and alerts for tenants, facility managers, landlords, and repair teams
- Analytics and reporting (tenant overview, resident satisfaction, service quality, job costing)
Accounting & finance management
Streamlining financial and accounting activities in compliance with regulatory requirements and tax regulations to ensure the company’s financial health, enhance investment activities, and facilitate accurate budget planning and forecasting.
- Balance sheet, cash flow, and income statements
- Investment management
- Invoicing and billing
- Accounting analysis
- Financial reporting and planning
- Returns calculations
- Rents and commissions
- Tax management
- Tenant accounting
Property management
Overseeing every aspect of property management, ERP helps to keep track of all maintenance requests, monitor maintenance activities in progress, perform repairs, optimize human and material resources for facility maintenance.
- Managing different types of buildings and facilities (office premises, commercial and residential sectors, plants, warehouses)
- Facility asset management (registration, stock level monitoring, location tracking)
- Facility condition monitoring
- Work order creation, scheduling, and monitoring
- Scheduling personnel and equipment for facility inspections, repairs, and maintenance
- Health, safety, and environmental compliance management
- Supply chain and inventory management (equipment, parts, or materials)
- Space management (space utilization monitoring, planning, and scheduling)
- Move management (move scheduling and planning)
- Facility access control management
Core integrations
To facilitate uninterrupted data flow and eliminate duplicate data entry, Itransition leverages custom or third-party integration solutions to connect your ERP platform with the current property management software ecosystem. Possible integrations we help to set up include:
Core integrations
Building information modeling
BIM encompasses digital models of buildings and infrastructure facilities with all the details (location, material, and cost). Integrating with the ERP helps carefully calculate the final project cost and meet the timeframes, equipment, and subcontractor requirements.
Building management system
BMS monitors and controls a building's HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning), electrical, lighting, and security systems. Integration with BMS helps monitor property conditions and detect inefficiencies and disruptions to ensure efficient building operation.
HR management system
Integration with the human resource management systems (HRMS), storing information on a company’s human resources (competencies, schedules, performance, training records), streamlines resource allocation, business process planning and scheduling, and payroll management.
MLS listings
Multiple listing service (MLS) integration facilitates seamless uploading of all property-related information into a publicly accessible database to streamline promotion activities and property-hunting workloads.
Property research services
Integration with research services helps identify investment opportunities, analyze real estate portfolios, and decide on real estate dissolution.
BI & analytics tools
The integration enables teams and individuals across all business units to create custom reports, run interactive analytics queries, and build sophisticated forecasting models.
Corporate website
The integration ensures smooth communication between your business and customers. It helps to visualize important information for accelerated property hunting and management.
Get a worry-free ERP implementation from Itransition
Best ERP software for real estate
Key features
- property management
- marketing
- CRM
- utility billing
- human resources
- inventory
- accounting
- purchasing
- sales
- projects
- land acquisition and development
- equipment and fleet management
- project planning and controlling
- procurement and subcontractor management
- contact management
Best for
- small companies
- mid-sized companies
Downsides
requires sufficient IT expertise to maintain and scale
Deployment
- SaaS
- PaaS
- on-premises
Pricing
depends on the number of users, functional modules and extensions
Key features
- finance management and accounting
- service and marketing automation
- human resource management
- billing
- asset management
- CRM
- sales order management
- opportunity management
- planning and budgeting
- revenue recognition
- financial analytics
- reporting
Best for
- companies of all sizes
Downsides
- price hikes in the long run
Deployment
- SaaS
Pricing
per user per month, depends on the functional modules and the number of users
Key features
- construction accounting (subcontracts, project management, budgets, job costing, project billing, project accounting, time and expense management)
- sales order management
- financial management (accounts receivables, accounts payable, general ledger, tax management)
- CRM (sales automation, self-service portals)
- field services
- analytics and reporting
Best for
- small companies
- mid-sized companies
Downsides
- steep learning curve
Deployment
- SaaS
- private cloud
- on-premises
Pricing
depends on the number of functional modules, type of license (SaaS or private cloud) and resource consumption
Key features
- customer relationship management
- customer service
- marketing
- field service
- financial management
- project service automation
- business intelligence
Best for
- growing companies
- enterprises
Downsides
broad partner ecosystem, making it difficult to choose a vendor
Deployment
- SaaS
Pricing
depends on the functional modules and the number of users
Key features
- financial management and accounting
- customer relationship management
- human resources
- sales management
- purchasing management
- inventory management
Best for
- growing companies
- enterprises
Downsides
- lack of flexibility
Deployment
- on-premises
- cloud
- hybrid
Pricing
depends on the functional modules and licensing type
Tips on how to choose ERP software for real estate
While selecting software for your real estate company, consider the following factors:
Customization
The selected real-estate ERP software platform should offer rich customization capabilities, so that companies could tailor it to the unique requirements of the sector.
Integration flexibility
Consider ERP solutions with an open architecture to fit into the company’s technology environment.
ERP modularity
Give preference to the ERP platforms that enable modular implementation. It will help to minimize primary investments and increase user acceptability.
Ease of use
Opt for a platform-independent solution to provide consistent user experience across multiple devices (including mobile ones).
Deployment mode
Choose the deployment mode (a cloud, on-premises, or hybrid) according to your geographical coverage, number of users, security and scalability requirements, and budget.
ERP benefits for the real estate industry
Access to data
Real-estate companies operate with large volumes of information, which makes timely access to relevant data a challenge. ERP centralizes all this data in structured storage and enables seamless access according to user roles for data-driven decision-making.
Connectivity
ERP implementation streamlines internal communication between departments and facilitates operations between tenants and landlords, property owners, and service companies. It helps to speed up problem resolution and simplifies property and real-estate management.
Automation
Enterprise resource planning software automates repetitive, mundane, time-consuming, and error-prone manual tasks (data entry/retrieval, report generation, payment processing, and bill generation) to improve the efficiency of real estate business processes.
Business process standardization
ERP helps to incorporate industry-standard practices and workflows. It reduces human errors, ensures consistency, improves customer service, saves time, and maximizes business effectiveness.
Better productivity
Reducing recurring and time-intensive tasks, ERP streamlines business operations, minimizes errors, and helps to shift focus from mundane tasks to high-value activities.
Regulatory compliance
Standardization, real-time data access, and accurate and timely reporting help comply with the rigorous real estate requirements, which vary depending on the region and jurisdiction.
Real estate ERP services we offer
Consulting
Itransition’s ERP consultants provide advisory support along with the real estate ERP implementation and optimization, helping you mitigate project risks and ensure high technology ROI.
Implementation
We provide end-to-end ERP implementation services, performing activities from business needs analysis to after-launch support to ensure smooth deployment of the real estate ERP solution within a set time and budget.
Custom ERP
Itransition can develop a bespoke ERP system with a fully tailored set of features and integrations for the real estate sector to cater to most specific business requirements and needs.
Customization
We deliver various ERP customization types for platform-based and custom ERP solutions to help real estate organizations meet their specific system, workflow, and application needs.
Integration
We connect your ERP system with other enterprise systems for seamless data exchange, enhanced user collaboration, and increased operational efficiency.
How to ensure the success of your real estate ERP
Change management
One of the most commonly cited challenges during the ERP implementation is insufficient business process reengineering. Companies could face resistance from employees overwhelmed with new capabilities, afraid of being replaced by technology, or needing additional training. Resistance to change is not a rare occurrence, so there is a need for thought-through organizational changes.
Comprehensive data security
Due to the large amount of sensitive data (tenants' personal data, financial data) real-estate companies should ensure its safety. The system should have multi-factor authentication, role-based access control, data encryption at rest and in transit, a comprehensive audit trail, and automated data deletion to prevent data breaches.
Integration flexibility
An ERP solution should enable compatibility with other generic and real-estate software solutions (besides pre-built integration points with the existing technology) to fit the full-fledged technology ecosystem of your company.
Mobile compatibility
Construction workers and real estate agents spend much time on the go, away from a desktop. Getting consistent experience on tablets and mobile phones (through a native app or a web-based solution) would considerably increase visibility into business processes and simplify the workflow.
Insights
CRM vs ERP: which one you need?
Learn the difference between CRM and ERP systems and find out whether your business needs a CRM, an ERP, or both.
Case study
Real estate sales automation software development
Learn how Itransition built a real estate sales solution with a data autocompletion feature, an admin panel, and a mobile-friendly interface.