RPA in Real Estate
How to Leverage Automation in the Real Estate Industry
Real estate is an industry that’s constantly evolving and adapting to a changing market. So it goes without saying that if a solution became available that could help streamline operations, cut costs, and revolutionize the way you run your business, implementing it would be a no-brainer.
Fortunately, this solution does exist – it’s called RPA and has the potential to completely disrupt the real estate industry as a whole.
What is RPA?
RPA is the use of software to carry out repetitive, time consuming business processes that would otherwise be performed manually by a human. Using RPA solutions, an organization can configure “bots” to take care of almost any task, particularly ones that are repetitive in nature.
In the context of real estate, RPA can be used to manage listings, leads, data, documents, and more, while offering numerous benefits for your business. More on this below.
How RPA Can Benefit Real Estate Professionals
As previously mentioned, RPA offers numerous benefits to realtors looking to streamline their operations, reduce costs, and improve productivity.
The following are some of the primary examples of how your real estate brokerage can benefit from automation:
Reduced Costs
Many organizations that implement RPA see significant overhead cost reductions year-over-year ranging from of 10 to 40 percent.
The reason for this is that automated processes are completed in a fraction of the time compared to when they are performed manually. Having RPA in place also enables you to restructure your staff and shift priorities, so administrative staff can focus on higher value tasks within the organization.
Improved Processes
With RPA bots acting as virtual assistants and taking care of manual procedures, it gives you the opportunity to streamline your operations and make significant improvements to existing processes that will leave your staff feeling satisfied and your clients happy.
RPA also provides transparency and visibility into your existing processes, and enables you to access large amounts of data that offer crucial insights.
Tasks Are Completed More Quickly
The amazing thing about RPA bots is that they have superhuman characteristics. They can operate with 100% efficiency 24/7, they don’t get tired or make mistakes, and do not require supervision. Plus, they don’t take sick days, breaks, or vacation time.
This enables RPA bots to perform tasks at a significantly faster rate than humans. In fact, it’s estimated that RPA bots can complete repetitive, time-consuming tasks 20 times faster than humans, and with significantly more accuracy.
Improved Productivity
With manual business processes in the hands of RPA bots, your realtors can focus on what’s most important – showing houses and closing sales!
With more time to focus on core business tasks, this helps improve overall productivity levels, as your realtors can focus on the more exciting aspects of the job instead of feeling bogged down.
Better Customer Experience
Not only does RPA give your team the time to focus on client-facing tasks, but it can also help improve the overall customer experience.
RPA bots are able to gather and manage data across multiple systems, including social media, blogs, and other profiles, which can be used to help determine the needs and preferences of your clients, and provide a more tailored experience.
Use Cases for RPA in Real Estate
RPA offers numerous use cases in the real estate industry, some of the most beneficial and significant being:
Matching Clients to Properties
RPA can be used to help find your clients the perfect property that ticks all their boxes, without you having to manually search through hundreds of listings.
Here’s how it works: RPA bots are deployed to search through your listings database and flag properties that meet a client’s list of criteria. This could include number of bedrooms, square footage, location, or used advanced features to tag specific wording (or pictures) within listings for specific clients and more.
Portfolio Management
RPA can help realtors manage their portfolio of properties by automatically updating various systems to remove properties that have been sold or rented.
Home Inspections
Home inspections are an important part of the home buying process, and help ensure that your clients have all the relevant information about a property before proceeding with the sale.
With RPA, the home inspection process becomes more simplified for all involved. RPA can automate inspection agreements, issue reminders and follow-ups for clients and agents, and send out notifications if an inspection is rescheduled.
Bank & Account Reconciliation
RPA is an ideal solution for account reconciliation, as it is a highly repetitive data-based process. In this case, bots can be deployed to extract bank statements and reconciliation and compare them with the general ledger.
Bots can also download bank statements to a shared drive or your organization’s financial application for reconciliation.
Record Management and Data Analysis
For real estate professionals, important records are often stored in hard copy or scanned formats. Either way, when it comes to analyzing data, examining these records and extracting data can take hours of time away from core business activities.
Using OCR, RPA can analyze the digitized records, extract data, and compile it into reports that are ready for analysis. Having access to this data can also offer numerous important insights into your business.
Mortgage Application
For mortgage brokers and lenders, processing mortgage applications is one of the most tedious and time-consuming tasks. Fortunately, RPA offers a solution.
RPA bots can accurately process mortgage applications by comparing documents from different sources, scanning documents for errors or missed fields, and copying the document to multiple applications or file locations.
Document Processing
Manual processing of the following real estate documents can be incredibly tedious and time-consuming, and lead to errors that affect:
- Lease agreements
- Purchase offers
- Property deeds
- Brokerage contracts
- Vendor payables and credit applications
- Property tax assessments
By digitizing documents, RPA bots can take care of the data entry and document processing for you, and carry out the following steps:
- Source documents in different locations
- Categorize documents based on the file type
- Use optical character recognition (OCR) to extract data
Lease Agreements
Creating a new lease agreement requires several steps. First, the lease agreement must be created. Next, someone from your staff will generate a electronic signature envelope (e.g. Docusign, Hellosign etc.) and process the contract in different software applications. It’s then filled out and signed, and sent back by the tenant. This can be an incredibly tedious process that is highly prone to errors. With RPA, every one of these tasks can be automated.
Accepting New Tenants
Property managers and real estate companies seeking new tenants for rental properties can also benefit from automation, as RPA bots can automate the following tasks:
- Create new tenant applications
- Perform background and credit checks
- Verify income, employment, and references
- Analyze applications and approve or disapprove them based on set criteria
- Send follow up emails
- Property tax assessments
Maintain Client Relationships
Often, realtors will maintain a long-term relationships with buyers/sellers to ensure that they are repeat clients. RPA can help with this.
RPA can be used to set up an automated email workflow that deploys bots to send emails to past clients at set intervals, like one year after they bought or sold their home, or on major milestones.
Sync Your Leads
Realtors often obtain leads from several different sources, which can be difficult to manage. With RPA in place, bots can sync all of these systems and compile all your leads into one single source.
RPA can even route leads geographically by postal code, filter the leads based on value, and pass them along to the relevant realtor.
Accounts Payable/Accounts Receivable
The process of manually processing tens, if not hundreds, of invoices is not only error-prone, but incredibly time-consuming. In fact, it’s estimated that processing an invoice from receipt to payment can take 4 to 16 days.
Plus, 76% of the accounts payable and accounts receivable process requires manual effort from human staff. With RPA, this is significantly reduced.
RPA bots can be deployed to perform the following accounts payable and accounts receivable related tasks:
- Data entry
- Payments
- Invoice Approvals/Matching
- Error reconciliation
- Closing the books
Maintain Client Relationships
Often, realtors will maintain a long-term relationships with buyers/sellers to ensure that they are repeat clients. RPA can help with this.
RPA can be used to set up an automated email workflow that deploys bots to send emails to past clients at set intervals, like one year after they bought or sold their home, or on major milestones.
Think RPA is Right For You?
Whether you are a beginner to the world of Robotic Process Automation and require some guidance, or you are already familiar with RPA solutions, our goal at Thrive Automation is to ensure your team is fully supported and empowered to implement RPA in a way that helps your business reach its full potential.
We offer the following options, depending on your knowledge and experience level with RPA:
- Automation Readiness Audit (ARA)
- Automation Roadmap
- Automation Pilot
- Automation Centre of Excellence
- Thrive Care