5 Ways RPA is Changing Real Estate by Saving Time and Enhancing Customer Experience 

The real estate industry has expanded in recent years, and property demand will rise in the future. Real estate is a significant economic development driver since it accounts for a large portion of individual and corporate wealth. The housing market can boost or impede economic progress. With the rise of the real estate business in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, the requirement for hiring a property management company and adopting property management software has grown. 

In real estate, processes like Tenant onboarding and screening, Contract Management, Account Reconciliation, Monitoring and Reminder, and Portfolio Management are all time-consuming fundamental business operations. They also carry huge risks for clerical errors. Robotic process automation software helps automate these processes, thus helping save time, effort, and money while reducing risk and making processes error-free.  

In this article, you will learn about the five RPA use cases that can be implemented in the real estate industry. 

Tenant onboarding 

Tenant onboarding is one of the real estate procedures which RPA can implement. This procedure is complicated and involves a large amount of paperwork. The manual work comes with risks and takes a long time to handle end-to-end requests. The customer's request is sometimes put on hold, giving the tenant a poor experience. In that instance, the customer may cancel the request. To solve those obstacles, RPA can play a critical role in making this process more efficient, reliable, precise, and transparent, while also providing a good customer experience. RPA can automate Property Management Software to eliminate work and paperwork. The necessary steps are as follows: 

1. Tenant Application Review. 

2. Document and background check. 

3. Income verification. 

4. Fill out a new tenant application. 

For example, RPA can automate Tenant Application Review by extracting data from the application forms, verifying the completeness of information, and performing validation checks against pre-defined criteria. It can also automate the Document and Background Check process by scanning the required documents for authenticity, comparing them against the company's database, and performing necessary checks. For Income Verification, RPA can extract financial information from the tenant's application or financial documents, verify it against the provided data, and determine the tenant's eligibility for the lease. Finally, RPA can fill out a new tenant application form by extracting relevant data from various sources and populating the form fields with accuracy and speed. 

Contract Management 

In the real estate industry, contract management is a time-consuming procedure. The manual process of drafting contracts and updating contract details in many programs is not simple. Managing a large amount of information gathered from several sources increases the chances of errors. RPA provides an intelligent automation solution that helps employees to process the contract and reduces the time required to do the same activity as humans. The RPA Bot (Virtual Robot) can form the following task to create the contract: 

1. Read the lease data from the property management system. 

2. Create the contract in the contract management software using the lease details. 

3. Update the lease details in the property management system once the contract is created. 

4. Send an email notification to the Tenant and the Business Team, along with the contract agreement. 

In the RPA Automation, the bot will read the lease data from the Property Management System and build the contract to enter the lease details in the contract management software. The contract details are updated in the Property Management System once the bot has created the contract. Then a notification email sends along with the contract agreement to the Tenant and the Business Team. 

Account Reconciliation 

 The manual account reconciliation method presents numerous issues, including duplicate entries, date/time errors, credit debit amount discrepancies, account missing, and longer work hours. The RPA's goal is to reconcile the Primary and Secondary ledgers and make appropriate revisions to journal entries in the ERP system. The RPA process will include the following steps: 

1. Log in to ERP and download the Primary and Secondary ledgers. 

2. To find discrepancies, reconcile the ledgers. 

3. Upload the adjustment journal entry to the ERP system.  

4. Repeat the reconciliation to ensure that the ledgers are matching. 

5. Send the successful process completion email to the business user, along with the primary ledger, secondary ledger, and journal entry in the Excel files. 

Monitoring and Reminder 

Monitoring and reminders are necessary to make the process transparent, but these two activities place additional stress on personnel. The employee watches the tasks and delivers reminders to the appropriate people. RPA can help us automate the Monitoring and Reminder work, allowing people to focus on other essential tasks. The following are tasks that can automate using RPA: 

1. The robot can verify the contract status in the Contract Management System. When the contract status in the system changes, the bot updates the 'contract status' and 'date' into another system called Property Management System. If the consumer does not approve the contract, an email notification sends to the customer.  

2. The robot insists that all customers approve the contracts created in the Contract Management System. In this regard, the bot sends an email notification to all the customers who didn't sign the contracts. 

3. The RPA can verify the rental payment. In this regard, the bot sends a reminder email to those Tenants who have not paid the rent. 

4. The robot can verify that the Contract Management System has a suitable and sustainable balance for creating the contracts. In this regard, the bot determines the remaining balance and monitors the Contract Management System for the minimal threshold balance; If there is insufficient balance in the application, an email notification send to business users. 

Portfolio management 

Portfolio management is the process that monitors the resources or assets in real estate for maintenance. Many businesses list their properties for sale or rent on websites. When a property is rented or sold, or when the asking price changes, the assets listed on the website must update. The employees are employed to monitor the resources for maintenance. Collecting asset details from several sources and updating the asset details on a different platform takes time and increases the possibility of errors.  

In conclusion, the real estate industry is expanding rapidly across the globe, and the requirement for property management software and automation has increased. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) offers solutions to streamline time-consuming and risky real estate operations, such as tenant onboarding, contract management, account reconciliation, monitoring, and portfolio management. Implementing RPA technology in the real estate industry can increase efficiency, accuracy, and transparency while reducing costs and risks.  

UiPath is one such strong RPA solution provider that offers customizable automation tools and services to meet the specific requirements of the real estate industry. With UiPath, real estate companies can leverage RPA technology to automate repetitive and error-prone tasks and focus on more strategic activities to boost economic growth.