One of the biggest challenges facing the real estate industry right now is viability. Statistics reveal that 20% of agencies are struggling to break even. With the increasing pressure to reduce fees, business owners are looking for ways to cut back on overheads while increasing productivity at the same time.
Scott Downing, Rockend’s Chief Customer Officer, joins us to discuss how they aided outsourcing company Beepo with end to end management.
Beepo is an outsourcing company based in the Philippines. They have shared with us that 62% of all their inquiries come from the real estate industry – with 38% being requests for property management assistants. Rockend uses Beepo’s outsourcing services as well, so they’re uniquely suited to help each other.
In one of Rockend’s property management surveys, one of the top three things that came out to them as a concern was actually outsourcing to be able to get better productivity from their office. How do they grow their businesses with increasing profit margins without increasing the number of people that they need to have in their office.
Rockend talked to a few of their largest customers and one of the things that was important for them to note was the necessity of owners documenting their internal processes.
“I had to make sure that my staff didn’t feel threatened that they would be losing jobs. I needed to create a new server. Going all the way to the Philippines or India to train staff doesn’t seem intuitive.” And so on, were some of the responses Rockend received when they asked their customers about their concerns.
Rockend made a system that can bring outsourced operations up and running in as fast as 24 hours. There are no security risks, no demand on office resources, and there’s absolutely no need to send someone overseas to ensure the quality of the work.
Scott Downing says there are three broad categories that can be done by a Rockend property assistant.
The first is about new property onboarding. So bringing that into your software and into your business, putting the property and the details like marketing and the listings around that. The second is around new tenant onboarding. That’s about bringing all the 10 details in pre-occupancy leasing all the stuff that comes with that scheduling, the pre-moving, inspection, etc. And then the third one is the end of the customer lifecycle, which is the tenancy exit and all the administration that comes with that.
As for the viability of outsourcing, there used to be a lot of trepidation around data security and whether people were skilled or educated enough to do the job. But that has completely flipped in the last six to eight months. Outsourced people are highly skilled and educated, they do see their jobs as real careers.