Our agency department have used a third-party estate agency software package for a few years now, and it did a satisfactory job at the basic functions, but was sorely lacking in some areas. For example, it couldn’t handle commercial property, and we deal with a lot of commercial property; it also didn’t handle lettings – only sales; and it was licensed on a concurrent per-user basis, which meant that we had to operate our business around what the software could do, rather than the other (correct) way round. We paid around £3k per year for this software and support.
Then, of course, the recession hit. Like many businesses, we started to look harder for cost savings, and areas where we could improve efficiency, particularly in the agency department, where we knew the property market would be taking a hit for some time, giving us some room to improve and change processes while we weren’t as busy as usual.
We’re now implementing SharePoint in many of our business processes and functions, and particularly so in agency. We initially set up a property register (a SharePoint list), and used that to manage our properties on the market. A big advantage to this was that we were no longer limited to having only a few users able to enter and manage the properties on the list. Then we developed our new website, and used workflows to send posts to our WordPress site, effectively automatically listing our properties as they were added to SharePoint. At the same time, an email is sent to the agency department, informing them to check the online listing for any errors, and to make sure it’s formatted correctly. Other emails are automatically sent to the creator of the listing, confirming that the property is online, and to the practitioner responsible for the property, and to the head of agency, so they have a record of uploads. It works well.
Now, we’re developing the system further. We’ve created an applicant list too, to manage the people interested in buying the properties; this links to the property register, and can record not only the details of the applicant(s) but also which properties they have viewed, which particulars they have been sent, who their solicitor is, and when they are due for review. Using the versioning capability of SharePoint, we can also retain CRM-style information, recording updates, telephone calls, emails, and other updates, recorded by time and date and the person responsible.
Our aim now is to implement a matching system, in order to match properties to applicants, and vice-versa. This is a little out of my depth, and gets into true .Net developing, so I’m speaking to SharePoint developers to establish how to go about this.
