There are 24 hours in a day, five business days in a week, and 52 weeks in a year. What percentage of this time do you spend reactively putting out property management fires? Are you able to focus on strategic tasks with the balance of your time? That is, if there even is time left over in your day. The trick to combatting some of the chaos and getting more time back in your day is to effectively utilize commercial real estate technology.
Using commercial real estate (CRE) tech enables property teams to proactively address tasks, prioritize accordingly, and run property operations more efficiently. Here are a few ways the best CRE firms use technology to create more time for themselves and their teams.
Prioritize the Most Critical Operations Tasks
Organizing tasks by priority allows you and your team to focus on what’s most important and complete those assignments first. Then you can focus on less critical tasks and responsibilities.
To understand what to prioritize, follow time management expert Stephen Covey’s recommendation of putting tasks into one of four buckets. They include: important and urgent, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, and not urgent and not important. The Urgent-Important Matrix helps you determine what is mission critical and what are just potential distractions.
Eliminate Unnecessary Distractions for Your Team
Good CRE technology helps eliminate unnecessary distractions by only displaying information that’s pertinent to each team member. For example, an engineer only needs to see the work orders and preventive maintenance tasks they’ve been assigned. If you’ve already prioritized these assignments, the software you use should automatically display the most critical work orders and preventive maintenance tasks first by level of importance and deadline. This helps your team eliminate distractions and pay attention to what matters most.
Empower Tenants to Solve Problems
Handling tenant requests and issues is one of the largest time commitments property managers face. So provide options for your tenants to submit requests to your team from tools they use every day. This includes a web browser-based portal, text messaging, and mobile apps.
Market leading building operations solutions in this area even offer automated replies and follow ups, such as assigning a free engineer to an outstanding work order. Empowering tenants untethers you and the property team from your desks. And it frees up time previously spent answering your phone or handling work orders through email.
Standardize Technologies Across Properties
Rolling out technology with the same features across your buildings reduces the challenge of managing multiple properties or spaces. It means all your building engineers use the same platform to track equipment, standardizes preventive maintenance tasks, and keeps all your important information in one place. The same goes for your property management team. Everything they need to work on is standardized across each property, making your team’s jobs more efficient.
Commercial Real Estate Technology Saves Time and Money
Simply put, if you want to save time and money, commercial real estate technology helps you make building operations more efficient. If you’d like to learn more about the market leading CRE tech options available, download Building Engines’ 2021 Buyer’s Guide to CRE Building Operations Technology.
