Real estate and property management involve multiple data processing tasks, including management of documents, inventory, key processes like procurement, accounting etc. These document and data-heavy rules-based processes in real estate reduce the productivity of employees and the business. Thanks to Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology, 70-80% of rules-based processes can be automated, and realtors can focus on more important tasks such as closing the deal.
What does RPA offer for the real estate industry?
RPA is the technology to automate processes that have a high degree of standardization and high repetition rates. RPA’s ability to perform and automate tasks such as data extraction, data migration and entry, data update and validation enables real estate companies to improve quality, speed, and efficiency of processes while reducing the risk of errors and workload on employees.
RPA Applications/ Use Cases in Real Estate
We have spotted 60+ RPA use cases, and almost half of RPA also applies to real estate since these processes include daily activities every business needs to perform. Here are the common real estate processes RPA can automate:
Real Estate Operations
Tenant onboarding
A prospective tenant’s problematic initial experience may lead to rejection, and the prospective signing a deal with a competing landlord. However, the tenant onboarding process has various manual and time-consuming tasks resulting in a bad customer experience.
RPA bots can be programmed to extract and process information to handle rule-based tasks in the tenant admission process. RPA use cases for tenant onboarding process are
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Creating a new tenant application
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Criminal background checks
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Verifications of income, employment, and references
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Approval or disapproval of the applicant
Payment reminders
Late payments is a common, repetitive and emotionally taxing part of real estate management. Automating rent payment reminder include setting up a bot for checking incoming payments for payee information and sending reminders to non-paying tenants.
Portfolio Management
Portfolio management is the process of managing real estate assets to preserve and increase value. This can be achieved by managing various assets or acquiring or selling individual components of the portfolio to increase or reduce certain portfolio assets. RPA enables realtors to list the sold-out/rented properties from the business system and update the data in the multiple websites to offer high visibility of the properties to ease portfolio management.
NAV calculations
The net asset value (NAV) is one of the best metrics to use when assessing the value of a real estate investment trust (REIT). Net asset value (NAV) in private real estate investing is the total value of an asset, minus any outstanding debt and the cost of any fixed or planned capital expenses. Real estate investors should understand NAV because asset prices are what drives current and future investor returns. For example, an increase in NAV correlates with an increase in cash distributed to investors from the underlying asset.
Real estate investors can automate some of the NAV calculation steps by using RPA solutions. NAV calculation consists of manual and labor-intensive steps such as collecting, validating, and processing market data and applying this to the funds to calculate a complete and accurate NAV. For example, this case study explains how Maitland, an investment and fund administration company, automated the NAV processes for 500 of the 700 funds with an RPA solution.
AML/KYC Compliance
RPA bots can validate existing customer data on transactions, extracting customer data from various internal sources. Customer info can be verified autonomously or transferred to an employee for review. RPA also can automatically send emails with alerts to frontline staff requesting necessary KYC documentation.
RPA also minimizes human contact with sensitive data that reduces the probability of fraud and compliance issues. This allows a detailed audit in case issues arise.
Financial Operations
Bank & Account Reconciliation
RPA can automate the extraction of bank statements from different banks’ documents along with reconciliation and comparison of these bank statements with the general ledger. RPA simplifies this process by uploading downloaded bank statements to a shared drive or financial application for reconciliation.
Accounts Payable (AP) / Accounts Receivable (AR) automation
Manual processing of invoices is expensive, time-consuming, and error-prone. Thanks to hyperautomation, the addition of advanced technologies to RPA, ~80% no-touch AP automation is possible for invoices submitted outside of the company’s Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). With the addition of machine learning and document extraction technologies such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to the RPA, businesses can automate most of the tasks in AP and AR processes.
To learn more on RPA, feel free to read our comprehensive research on the topic:
- Ultimate Guide to Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
- 67 RPA Usecases/ Applications/ Examples
- 45 RPA Case Studies: Explore RPA in your Industry & Function
- Future of RPA: In-depth Guide to RPA Innovation
- Cognitive RPA: in-Depth Guide to how AI capabilities are integrated to RPA tools
And if you still have questions on RPA applications in real estate, don’t hesitate to contact us:
