Robotic process automation is more than a trend these days. We’ve seen it go from an interesting concept to one of the most significant innovations for real estate companies. After helping dozens of companies integrate RPA, we can safely say it’s a game changer.
However, it’s still a very young technology, especially compared to other concepts like ERP systems, CRM, and document management systems. That’s why we still find ourselves explaining RPA to clients, even after they’ve requested the technology themselves.
RPA has a vast range of benefits, especially once specific platforms and tasks come into play. We’ve found RPA scripts from UiPath and similar solutions to be a lot more versatile than what appears at first glance.
That’s why we’re exploring RPA and its effects on the real estate industry today.
How can property management benefit from RPA?
Real estate keeps growing as an industry. There will always be a need for home and shelter, so real estate and property management companies are just part of our nature. That’s enough reason for technological innovations, like RPA, to be useful.
That said, we also need to consider the current global context we’re living in. Countless businesses have taken a significant hit, and real estate has been quite uncertain for a while now. We need efficiency and cost-effective solutions more than ever.
That means RPA is starting to become a necessity more than just an edge, like it used to be. RPA allows you to relocate resources to projects with better returns without neglecting basic and repetitive tasks within your company.
ComTec Information Systems has a nice and short article on the primary advantages of RPA for property management. It offers great insight into the fundamental functionality of RPA, while shedding light into what else is possible.
Refunds
Reimbursements are quite common for many companies, and overpayment isn’t as rare as you’d think. RPA allows you to notify account receivable teams immediately, as well as help them validate, calculate, and send the required payment to the right people.
Account statements
General ledger reconciliation requires downloading lots of statements from multiple banks. Reconciling your balances and comparing them with your GL takes a lot of time and resources. You can automate the data compilation into specific drives and apps to carry out these reconciliations.
Coupons
Oddly enough, coupons aren’t a common topic discussed in the real estate industry. Still, they can help you boost sales, and RPA is great for coupon creation and management. You can create and process requests using RPA scripts. Naturally, all previous functions also apply here.
Finding GL mismatches
General ledger code comparisons with your budgets can be a challenge even for experienced resources. That’s why mismatches aren’t rare at all, which occur when your GL code isn’t on your budget despite showing in your templates. RPA highlights these exceptions within your Excel sheet for correction.
Account updates
Entering a wrong number or holder name for a bank account is a common mistake. A nice RPA implementation for your company is correcting this entry within your property management software. RPA can compare this information with bank statements and correct accordingly.
Payment corrections
Speaking of correcting, RPA can also correct wrong payments. If you’ve sent money to a wrong destination, automation scripts can validate these entries in your general ledger. It uses posts and bank intimation to revise your transactions properly.
Real estate companies and RPA implementation
RSM has another interesting article on RPA and how commercial real estate companies have been implementing it. It does a great job at pointing out the need to improve back office efficiency and how RPA can help streamline automatable tasks in your company.
RPA is excellent for automating tasks based on repetition and referring to information in a database. That means processes like reconciliation and audits are perfect candidates for automation in the real estate sector. However, payments, financial reports, and protocol testing are equally useful tasks for automation.
AIMultiple points out several examples of how companies are implementing RPA right now.
Application creation
Creating applications for your tenants can be tedious and time-consuming. That can lead to subpar customer experience and losing prospective tenants to your competition. RPA can automate this task thanks to its rule-centric approach, with variables and triggers.
Background checks
Knowing your tenants’ background is vital for both residential and commercial real estate. You should assess criminal backgrounds to determine whether or not it’s a risk to take them into your property. However, background checks also include experiences with previous landlords and compliance with agreements.
Verification
Knowing your tenants’ background is vital for both residential and commercial real estate. You should assess criminal backgrounds to determine whether or not it’s a risk to take them into your property. However, background checks also include experiences with previous landlords and compliance with agreements.
Tenant approval
The reason for all those previous steps is to know whether you should approve or deny your potential tenant. This process is entirely based on rules: if a condition is met, an action occurs. We’ve personally helped companies with scripts that assess the relevant information about their prospective tenants and approve or deny their application accordingly.
Reminders
Late payments are one of the annoying realities of real estate. Automating payment reminders is, understandably, one of the most common automation tasks requested by property managers. Bots can compare incoming payments with payee data to spot who needs a reminder.
Management
Managing your portfolio is vital to maintain the value of your assets. That means selling, buying, and managing your portfolio components accordingly. RPA lets property managers list properties according to their current status: whether they’re available, rented, or sold. Naturally, updating this information is part of the script.
Calculating NAV
Net asset value calculations are critical if for investment trust assessment. Most of these calculations are easy to automate with RPA scripts, especially tasks like collection and validation of market data. Likewise, bots can also apply these calculations to your funds for better accuracy.
Compliance
Bots can verify customer data among your transactions. This task is necessary for reviewing potential fraud and compliance problems down the line. They can send alerts to request the required KYC information. Another side benefit is minimizing direct interaction with sensitive data, which boosts security.
Financial reconciliation
This process is one of the most popular automation requests we’ve received, which is easy to expect. RPA is a great way to reduce the time it takes to extract the relevant statements and compare them with your ledger. We’ve also mentioned how RPA can compile and upload these statement compilations for manual reconciliation.
Payables and receivables
Finally, processing invoices manually is more than tedious. It takes more resources than most people think it should, and it’s prone to problematic errors. RPA automation, with advanced technologies (like machine learning) lets us automate most processes related to account payables and receivables.
Is RPA worth it today?
As Retransform notes in its RPA in real estate article, foregoing RPA often means losing time and money, or at least not making the most out of your business hours. We can also agree that repetition-based tasks are tedious and frustrating for your employees, and they even take a toll on their motivation and focus.
That can result in costly mistakes as the worst-case scenario. Even if it’s not a significant problem for your company, you can still make better use of that time. You could prepare and relocate your resources towards better opportunities and projects, for instance.
Not implementing RPA won’t kill your company, but the reasons to do so are more prominent than the reasons not to. Real estate works with lots of repetitive and data-dependent processes: financial transactions, agreement reconciliation, balance reconciliation, and more.
That means real estate is a prime industry for reaping the benefits of RPA to their full potential. As the article we mentioned suggests, we can summarize RPA’s advantages into two noticeable improvements.
Better efficiency
In the end, RPA lets you make the most out of the time and resources you have. It frees up your employees to perform more profitable tasks, also contributing to better worker satisfaction.
However, it also eliminates human error if the scripts were set up properly. It guarantees constant results, which provides the predictability you need for optimal scaling.
Easier management
Financial and project management also becomes a lot easier. Having fewer human resources working on repetition-based tasks means allowing management resources to focus on the most relevant projects.
Eliminating human error also means reducing the time spent on revising mistakes. It also makes account reconciliation and audits a lot simpler thanks to predictability and fewer variables.
Why should you implement it right now?
Here, we can talk from experience: most companies think RPA isn’t all that important because of many misconceptions. RPA is often associated with “true” AI and machine learning and “consciousness,” which is a problem.
We can automate a wide range of tasks and processes utilizing AI scripts. They’re basically workflows that allow us to produce algorithms. These algorithms have several variables, conditions, and triggers.
Why are we saying all of that? Because they shed light into two vital considerations.
It's already useful
RPA already covers a lot of ground in what it can automate. We’ve helped dozens of businesses automate countless tasks. We’ve already touched on several RPA automatable processes—and not just from our experience.
Setting up UiPath scripts and integrating them into your management platforms is a lot quicker than you might think. We ensure you don’t have to worry about forgetting important tasks that could disrupt your business down the line.
Speaking of disruption, RPA also offers an invaluable benefit: eliminating human error. Countless companies lose time and money over simple mistakes. With repetitive tasks, it’s easy to lose focus with time. That means your resources are more prone to make potentially costly mistakes.
RPA works nonstop. You don’t have to offer breaks or refreshment to keep it working to its optimal output. It simply produces the results you need, depending on the conditions we feed to the algorithm.
RPA will only become better
The most impressive aspect of RPA’s usefulness today is how primitive it still is. That’s far from a bad thing, by the way. We can attest for its efficiency and how much it can improve your company, and it’s still only on its first steps.
RPA is only going to improve as AI and related technologies develop. With the COVID crisis, we’ve seen rapid improvements to the technology. Implementing RPA early means you’ll be able to grow your company with it.
Early technological adoption is a huge advantage when you do it with technologies that can grow your company noticeably. By the time the majority of the industry starts to catch up, you’ll already be an expert on RPA.