Sustainable property management!
At the beginning of the year, the tech company PropertyExpert and the property manager HEICO teamed up with the aim of optimizing and realigning property management processes with today's possibilities for the future. The focus is on the laborious process of obtaining comparative offers for craft services.
To date, industry practice in property management has usually involved obtaining two comparative offers for craft services. In fact, this process is often difficult to implement in practice because comparative offers are difficult to obtain, the process is time-consuming and ties up valuable personnel capacity. An optimized process should make the time-consuming process of obtaining comparative offers unnecessary, but still ensure uniform industry standards and transparency for clients.
The current situation: In order to ensure uniform industry standards and to be able to present offers comprehensibly to clients, they are checked against a list of services for necessary craft services. Another factor to ensure objective evaluation criteria is obtaining and checking two comparative offers before awarding the contract. Basically a good idea that has been used for many years, but has one major disadvantage: it ties up a lot of human resources who have to take care of obtaining and checking these offers.
The process of the future: More efficiency through artificial intelligence!
Through an ideal combination of human expertise and artificial intelligence, PropertyExpert offers a highly efficient process of digitalized and completely independent offer and invoice verification in the area of maintenance measures. The use of artificial intelligence already enables a largely automated preliminary check of many offers and invoices in many places, so that it usually only takes a few days to hours from the receipt of documents to the complete check by PropertyExpert's craft experts. If there is any suspicious evidence (both factual in nature and prices that are unusual for a region or industry), a detailed check will automatically be initiated by one of PropertyExpert's more than 50 craft experts from more than a dozen trades, who will also discuss any discrepancies directly with the offerer and invoice issuer clarify by phone. This avoids unnecessary touchpoints with clients, thereby saving resources and ensuring that no utopian prices are quoted.
This means that, in general, a very fast, partially automated test is possible. If no comparison offers can be obtained, HEICO's property managers ensure that the proposed offer has been reliably and independently tested against the entire market by providing detailed test reports submitted to owners and investors for each inspection by PropertyExpert. Because of the immense volume of comparison data from the respective areas, the result of the review process corresponds, to put it simply, to obtaining offers thousands of times over, which would make the manual collection of further comparison offers unnecessary if you think the thought through.
This process has been used very successfully in the insurance industry, PropertyExpert's core business, for more than 10 years and has established itself as an industry standard, meaning that PropertyExpert has been able to assert itself as a market leader here for years. HEICO is therefore of the opinion that this process, which has been tried and tested millions of times, can easily be transferred to the offer review for real estate maintenance processes due to the overlapping offer content and delivers valid and audit-proof results.
HEICO has been relying on modern processes in all areas for a long time - and so the approach of the targeted use of artificial intelligence when checking offers immediately met with open ears from many clients. In a 6-month test phase, extensive scenarios were tested and a lot of experience was gained. The results were very positive, reliable and efficient, so that from the point of view of HEICO and PropertyExpert there is now nothing standing in the way of a start.
HEICO explains this in more detail: “We hope that clients, capital management companies and higher-level bodies will be very willing to cooperate and we look forward to every client who is currently taking this path with us or would like to go with us in the near future. It is crucial for the further development of industry standards how many people involved are willing to soften existing processes and give digitalization a chance.”
Björn Rieger, Managing Partner, HEICO Property Partners, it is a great concern to advocate for the industry to rely on modern digital solutions:
“Working with PropertyExpert allows us to deploy our valuable human resources much more efficiently where they are really needed. The shortage of skilled workers also affects our industry and we have to make sure that we do not employ talented people in tasks that can be done much more sensibly and quickly using sophisticated digital solutions. With PropertyExpert we have found the ideal partner with whom we can significantly optimize resource-consuming processes - both in terms of time and personnel. I think it’s time for a rethink in the industry.”
Auch Ferdinand von Klocke, Head of Business Unit Real Estate at PropertyExpert, is very happy with the developments:
“After very successful test fields in the last few months, we are officially switching to regular operations with HEICO at the beginning of 2024 and are very pleased about this collaboration. We are not satisfied with short-term individual solutions, but rather focus on developing progressive, efficient processes that, in the best case scenario, have what it takes to serve as a standard for the entire industry and establish themselves in the long term. And that seems to be the case here in the area of property management. We are looking forward to further collaboration!”
This partially automated offer review process, developed jointly by HEICO and PropertyExpert, can basically be used in all property management companies and therefore represents a promising option for a new, more modern industry standard.
