Rhodes Realty: Putting people first in property management

This blog post relates to Rockend, one of our previous brands. For more information please read the press release.

In his two decades in the real estate industry, Greg Timms has seen a lot of change. But one thing hasn’t changed: property management is a people business. The General Manager at Rhodes Realty reveals the advantages of using a property management software like Property Tree, and most notably, how it allows his team to focus on people, rather than processes.

Building relationships in Real Estate

According to Greg, real estate has been and always will be about relationships, “People want to deal with people, and property managers are dealing with what is often one of their clients’ biggest investments,” he says.

But technology in property management has dramatically changed the way businesses interact with clients – a fact that Gregg and his team know very well. “Whereas once it was a case of picking up the phone, today it’s all about going online. What our clients expect in terms of responsiveness has sky-rocketed and our property managers need to be on the ball 24/7.”

To accommodate their clients’ wants, needs and expectations, the team at Rhodes Realty knew that they need the right systems in place to support them.

Looking for the right property management system

The team at Rhodes Realty had been using another system for many years, but as time went on, it couldn’t seem to catch up with the demands of their business.

Greg shares his issues with the old system, “Back-ups were a particular problem. It had reached the point where it was taking up to three hours a day. Along with the fact that the storage capacity of our server was not sufficient, it simply wasn’t feasible to continue using that system.”

Greg also remembers running end-of-month processes as being a particular pain point. “It wasn’t unusual for the system to crash in the middle of the end-of-month run, which meant lots of rigmarole to restore back-ups and get everything back on track,” he says.

The business simply cannot afford such inefficiencies and decided that it was time to move to a cloud-based solution.

Feature-rich and user-friendly solution

As a past user of Rest Professional, Greg had always been impressed with Rockend’s systems and had been watching the development of Property Tree with interest.

Greg was initially drawn to Property Tree because it is a cloud-based system, but also because of how user-friendly it is. “These days, we expect to be able to pick up a device or log into a system and intuitively discover how it works and what to do. That’s Property Tree.”

As an incredibly feature rich property management software, Greg was impressed how easy is was to get started with Property Tree. “Changing systems is always going to cause a bit of upheaval, so you want the process to be as simple as possible – and it was with Property Tree. From migrating to a new system through to learning and implementing new processes, it was all straightforward. We didn’t have any issues.”

Streamlining property management tasks

Whereas end of month was once a problem for Greg and his team, it’s now a breeze. “What used to take half a day – or even longer – is completed in 10 minutes. It’s really one of the best features of Property Tree,” he says. “And daily manual back-ups are now a thing of the past. With Property Tree it happens automatically overnight, so there’s no interruption to our workflow during the day.”

Automated communications for customer satisfaction

Since changing over to Property Tree, Greg has been able to automate a myriad of manual and routine tasks, and he’s been particularly impressed with not only the efficiencies this has created but also how much it’s contributed to his ability to communicate with clients.

“The level of automation Property Tree offers saves us a lot of time,” he says. “Being able to automate reminders and follow-ups has been a godsend – and the fact that it’s all logged back against a client communications history is great.”

Moreover, Greg says that Property Tree has made it easier to update their clients and ensure their words turn into action. “We can do tasks quickly and then report back to our clients to let them know we’ve done what we said we would do. Property Tree makes follow through easier.”

Saving time

Greg says that a big part of Property Tree’s value lies in its ability to save his property management team time so they can focus more on their clients.

“Property managers need to be able to give good advice and positively influence interactions with clients,” he explains. “By letting technology do what technology does best – which is a lot of the more routine and mundane tasks – we can get back to building stronger relationships with clients.”

“Property Tree has made our lives a whole lot easier. It’s saves us time and there’s less stress.”

To know more of Greg’s experience with using Property Tree, read his customer case study.