Over the last twenty years, property management has made enormous progress from paper-based record keeping, spreadsheets, and in-person interaction with tenants and vendors to digital property management.
Specific software makes real estate management cheaper and more efficient by eliminating manual data input, calculations, and unnecessary communication.
There are dozens of property management software available on the market, each with its strengths and weaknesses. However, suppose your real estate company isn't ready for compromises and aims for spotless performance and customizability. In that case, your solution is to create a web-based property management system from scratch.
In this article, we overview the reasons to build a custom property management app and help you decide whether this investment is worth it. If you think that custom software will help your organization succeed, then in the next chapter, you will find a detailed guide on property management software development.
Let's start your journey to effective rental property management!
Types of property management software: SaaS and custom PMS
We begin with a definition. A property rent management system is software that helps property managers automate the operations connected with real estate rental.
PMS software is popular for multiple types of real estate:
- Residential real estate
- Commercial real estate
- Hospitality properties
- Senior living facilities
- Educational properties
- Healthcare facilities
As you can see, the types of facilities differ significantly, as do their requirements for the PMS they use. There's no universal solution that can satisfy the needs of all property types. That's why the market is full of SaaS solutions targeting specific facilities.
Property management system examples
SaaS, or software as a service, is a ready-made application available on a subscription basis that can be configured and used immediately. Thousands of businesses in your industry use SaaS apps. The choice of ready PMS is vast, and each organization can find the best match. Here are just a few examples of property management systems:
- ALIS (Assisted Living Information System) focuses on senior living facilities. It automates resident management, care planning, medication tracking, billing, and compliance reporting features.
- Roompact is a SaaS platform for managing colleges and universities' residential life and student housing operations. It offers features for room assignments, student conduct tracking, and communication with residents.
- storEDGE is a cloud-based property management software solution designed specifically for self-storage facilities. It helps manage unit rentals, tenant accounts, gate access control, online reservations, and facility maintenance.
Although SaaS apps have significant benefits, such as low implementation costs and immediate access to property management functionality, it is not a one-size-fits-all solution.
The applications mentioned above target specific organizations but still fail to cater to the unique requests that may appear. If your approach to, let's say, self-storage management differs from the one offered by storEDGE, you will likely have trouble integrating this real estate property software into your organization. Ready SaaS systems are rigid and often lack scalability, so instead of automating your daily operations, it may cause new challenges that require your employees' attention.
Building a custom property management system may be an option for you.
Why you should build a custom PMS?
The word "custom" explains it all. This software is perfectly tailored to your internal processes. Here's what benefits the custom property management app brings to you:
- Integration with the software you already use daily (messengers, analytics, advertising, HRM, whatever)
- Unique functionality to automate specifically your business tasks
- No irrelevant features, which you often get as a bundle when subscribing to SaaS
- Ability to add or modify any module as the need arises
- Scalability along with your organization's growth.
However, building a perfect PMS comes with certain challenges.
Challenges of building a custom PMS
Custom property management systems are very attractive for real estate businesses. However, developing your software is a challenging process. Here are the key obstacles you may face and how they can be eliminated:
- The need for a skilled team led by a product owner
Real estate companies usually lack the in-house expertise to build a PMS from scratch. If this is your case, you can request a property management software development service from a team that works in this industry. Outsourcing end-to-end product development means you only inform the team of your requirements, and they take over the implementation. The product owner represents your property management company stakeholders and ensures the development process's outcome corresponds with your expectations.
- Data security and compliance
A real estate management system handles sensitive data, including tenants' personal information, financial records, and property details. Ensuring data security and compliance with regulations such as GDPR or CCPA requires robust security measures and adherence to best practices in data protection. Your development team will also take care of the technical side of data security, encryption, server security, etc.
- High software development cost
There's no clear answer to how much property management software costs. Many factors impact the price. However, you must be ready to invest around $100,000. The app development cost is one reason rental management companies postpone digitalizing their services and keep allocating their working time inefficiently.
- Slow return on investment
When building a custom solution, you have to spend a solid sum of money upfront and then wait several months for the first version of the application, which your team will improve later. While a custom PMS offers long-term benefits in improved efficiency, productivity, and scalability, the ROI may be realized gradually over time as the system becomes fully operational and users become proficient in using it. You cannot address this challenge directly, but your expectations about real estate management software development should be realistic.
If you are still interested in building housing management software that will seamlessly integrate into your organization and support your internal processes, prepare to move through three stages.
Steps to build a PMS
If you are building an app from scratch, you will face the same three stages, no matter what type of software you are working on. Here is how to develop a property management system for real estate:
Stage 1. Discovery phase
During the discovery phase, you involve different professionals who work on the concept of your application. Their main tasks are:
- Research the industry, get acquainted with industry standards and best practices
- Analyze the market, evaluate the available software solutions
- Research your specific business case, gather requirements from stakeholders
- Define the goal you plan to achieve with custom PMS.
When the discovery team has all the information, they start working on the main deliverables of the discovery phase:
- Defining the scope and objectives of the project
- Creating a project timeline and budget
- Designing the architecture and selecting the tech stack for rental property management software development
- Wireframing and prototyping user interfaces
After the discovery phase, you clearly understand your strategy for building the property management software, and you are all set to start the actual development process.
Stage 2. MVP development
We always emphasize the importance of starting your app development with a minimum viable product (MVP). This approach helps you allocate your resources wisely and start with the core functionality only to get your employees' feedback and prove the PMS idea is worth your further investments. Also, due to the short development time (3-4 months), you can start digitizing your internal processes and evaluating the benefits soon.
After you see that your MVP produces good results, you will be ready to invest more effort into further development and improvement of the application. So, enough introduction. How do you build a property management MVP?
The process starts with setting up the development environment. Your technical team will define the technologies and approaches for the most effective development process. You may trust your team with the selection of programming languages, frameworks, databases, and other tools, the setup of version control, CI/CD pipelines, etc. This preparation is essential as it defines your strategy for PMS app development.
After you are done with your toolset and dev environment, here are the main steps you have to take to build an apartment management application:
- UI/UX design
Your app designers will handle the app's interface and usability. Don't neglect this stage, as poor user experience may ruin all your efforts in creating a tool tailored to your internal business processes. Instead of blindly following design trends, cooperate with a designer who emphasizes the importance of user experience.
- Implementing the core features
During the discovery phase, you prepared a shortlist of features that have to be in your minimum viable product, such as property listing, tenant management, or rental payments. Your developers will code the functionality.
- Third-party integrations
Some web-based property management system features require integration with external resources, such as analytics services, CRM platforms, MLS, etc. Your development team can also use ready-made third-party services to speed up the app creation process. For example, you can integrate Twilio for communication with tenants instead of building your own chatting solution from scratch. This decision may save you weeks in development and a few thousands of dollars.
- Software testing
The quality assurance team will check all the developed functionality and ensure it works according to initial requirements. They may also perform security testing to ensure your user data is protected from unauthorized access and leaks.
- Deployment and launch
Deployment is the process of making the freshly developed or updated application available to users. The team may provide the user acceptance testing with stakeholders (you and your managers). In some cases, training and onboarding will also play an essential role in your real estate management system.
The launch of your MVP is the beginning of your digitalization journey. You start enjoying the first benefits of automation and get new ideas of what deserves improvement. Your backlog of desired features starts to grow, and you want to proceed with PMS development.
Stage 3. Further development
There are three main aspects you have to work on after your MVP is live:
- Work on new property management system features and extend the functionality of your product.
- Provide technical support and fix bugs discovered by your users
- Maintain the application by ensuring compatibility with new versions of operating systems, frameworks, and tools.
As you see, the work on your property management application doesn't end after the initial release. You invest your time, money, and energy into the software, constantly improving it and ensuring it brings maximum value to your internal processes.
Bonus stage. Sell your property management app as SaaS
Soon, you will notice significant improvements in your property management company's operations. You will also realize that many similar companies worldwide face similar problems and might be in search of real estate management tools to solve them.
Once you already have this solution, why not start selling it to your colleagues and turn an application into another source of revenue? It won't be hard to find property management firms to gladly pay a moderate monthly property management software price to streamline their operations.
To make this possible, you have to learn about migration to SaaS. We won't dive deeper into it in this article as it has yet to be relevant for most of our readers. However, you must be aware of this possibility and consider expanding your operations to this niche.
Conclusion
Building your custom property management system to streamline business operations is a wise choice. However, you have to consider all the challenges of this process and enter the development of your app with full awareness of what you expect in the end.
Custom app development is costly, and you don't want to risk large sums of money. Start with doing your research and proceed with hiring a discovery team to achieve the most reliable result.
If you don't have an internal programming team adept at building apps from scratch, it might be worth considering services from companies that specialize in real estate software development. Outsourcing to a team with focused industry expertise can liberate your schedule for pivotal business development activities. With their help, you can anticipate a flawless Property Management System (PMS), customized to align with your unique goals and operational needs.