Document Management is a painful topic for many real estate companies. Many factors can contribute towards poor document management, chiefly among them using a maze of endless folders and lack of data integration with documents. Therefore, addressing these issues can make real estate document management easy.
Is your organization still relying on file servers? Maybe you’re doing somewhat better and using cloud services to store your documents, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, M-Files, or even SharePoint. But are you using these tools as just glorified file servers in the cloud?
What’s wrong with a maze of folders?
Unfortunately, many businesses migrate to cloud-based document repositories by just shifting the same old folder structure from their legacy file servers. I think we’ve all experienced the hunt for files placed somewhere on our file server like a needle in a haystack. You’ll understand if you have often drilldown to a bunch of folders, hoping to find a file but got nothing.
There is nothing wrong with folders, but they must be well organized. A well-organized folder structure is:
- Consistent across portfolios and tied to centrally managed document categories
- Supplemented by automatic metadata tags, so you don’t need to drill down to folders, to find (or not find) your documents
Are your documents integrated with your portfolio data?
Lack of systems integration forces you to house data and documents in different silos, making real estate management difficult. Which therefore causes document duplication across silos. Often there isn’t a single version of the truth, and people are working on disconnected versions of the same document in different folder paths.
A well-integrated real estate document management system has the following characteristics:
- When you’re looking at a property, tenant, loan, or legal entity, you should also see all of their corresponding documents
- When you’re looking at a document, you should be able to see its corresponding property, tenant, loan, and legal entity
- There should be no duplication of documents, which is only possible when you see documents in the context of your real estate portfolio
Are your contract documents alerting you?
As a real estate professional, you may have often come across situations where a contract expired or auto renewed by mistake. With a well established document management system, users should not only be able to handle the complete lifecycle of each contract but also be alerted when contracts are about to expire or auto renew.
A reliable document management system must have contract management features that include:
- Contract Lifecycle Management
- Contracts Linked to Portfolio Data
- Contract Expiration Alerts
Conclusion
Document management is a painful topic for many real estate companies. Many factors can contribute towards poor document management, chiefly among them using a maze of endless folders and lack of data integration with documents. Make sure that your folder structure is based on centrally-managed document categories, documents are integrated with your portfolio, and your contract documents have an alert mechanism to help you stay on top of critical dates. Addressing these issues can make real estate document management easy and allow you to focus on your business.
How we can help
Document Management is a robust component of CRES Real Estate Solutions, optimized for the real estate industry’s unique needs. Securely organize documents with properties, tenants, acquisitions, legal entities, and loans. You can manage them in CRES or access them from MRI, Yardi or any other property management system. Using our Document Extraction Wizard, you can bulk extract targeted portfolio documents for external sharing.
What is CRES Real Estate Solutions?
CRES is a robust suite of real estate solutions based on Microsoft Office 365 that consolidates data, documents, and business processes. it can be integrated with any real estate system such as MRI, Yardi, VTS, or RealPage. It includes document management, business process management, business intelligence, and real estate & corporate contracts management. CRES Automation Framework allows efficient management of any type of repetitive initiatives involving real estate, people, and processes.
About Irfan Butt
CRES Technology – Founder and CEO
A strategic leader with more than twenty years of progressive experience in Business Administration, Finance, Product Development, and Project Management. Irfan has a proven track record in a broad range of industries including hospitality, real estate, banking, finance, and management consulting.