Digital Transformation Roadmap for Legacy Real Estate Systems

Real estate legacy systems are among the core barriers for RE companies, property management firms, and commercial and residential landlords to drive digital transformation. Outdated or no longer supported solutions decrease efficiency, skyrocket costs, and reduce competitive opportunities.

More than that, outdated products cause frustration among team members, lead to increased resource consumption and hold real estate companies back from growth.

This is why many forward-thinking proptech companies update and revamp their legacy systems and, by doing so, cut down costs, optimize productivity, grow sales, future-proof business agility, and succeed with digital transformation. In this blog post, we’ll explore the challenges and benefits of revamping real estate legacy systems and share battle-tested tips from Ascendix’ vetted proptech experts on how to modernize outdated real estate solutions in a cost-compressed and scalable manner.

Real Estate Legacy Systems: A Barrier to Success in PropTech

Real estate legacy systems are outdated or no longer-supported digital products that are still in use in a real estate business despite their incapability to keep up with the demands of a fast-paced proptech business.

Here are at least three ways how real estate legacy systems hold your proptech business back from growth and scalability.

Increased Maintenance & Support Costs

As proptech businesses grow and evolve, they face the ongoing challenge of maintaining and updating their technology systems. While legacy products may have served a valuable purpose in the past, they now become a burden for most real estate-related companies. Outdated systems limit proptech companies from integrating with new technologies, scaling products with brand-new features, and shifting to the cloud computing infrastructure. All these roadblocks lead to increased costs for support and maintenance to keep existing outdated solutions operating and profitable.

This means real estate companies with legacy systems need to waste resources to support their products instead of growing them for a higher ROI, increased sales, and market growth. The longer real estate companies support their outdated solutions, the more opportunities they lose compared to forward-looking competitors.

Zero Competition & Growth Opportunities

The above-mentioned barrier is linked with another: real estate companies utilizing legacy systems lose many growth points and are often edged out by the market competition. For example, your outdated system may not allow integration with modern third-party technologies related to payment gateways, search functionality, email services, etc. This means end-users will most likely prefer feature-rich competitors’ products as they provide way more customer-centered approach.

As a result, your retention rates and sales will drop while product maintenance and marketing costs will plateau at best or climb up in a less positive scenario. This directly impacts your competitiveness and leaves few opportunities to survive in the market.

Low Compatibility with Modern Technologies

The fast-paced real estate industry requires proptech vendors to integrate with modern and innovation-driven technologies and services to win customers. Brand-new features for tenants and landlords, AI-driven capabilities, advanced analytics, and streamlined search experiences are among the core real estate technology trends 2023.

Most of the above are only available if your system has high compatibility with modern tools and integrations. If it is not, you are left behind with a limited number of outdated technologies that usually do not add up much value to the existing functionality within your legacy software.

Overall, real estate legacy systems limit real estate companies from embracing digitalization and keeping a competitive edge in an increasingly digitalized proptech world.

Unlock Your Real Estate Potential: The Benefits of Upgrading Your Legacy Systems

Before we proceed to the core steps of revamping real estate legacy systems, here are up-to-date statistics that prove the high efficiency and profitability of proptech digital transformation for your business.

• 87% of real estate professionals credited technology for improved efficiency within their proptech business (National Association of Realtors).
• 78% of proptech experts experienced streamlined productivity with tech adoption (National Association of Realtors).
• 77% of real estate C-level executives believe tech-fueled innovation drives enhanced real estate customer service (National Association of Realtors).
• 66% of home builders stated they see improved competition capacities with real estate tech adoption (National Association of Home Builders).
• 78% of real estate vendors experienced revenue growth by adopting tech-fueled proptech solutions.

Here are the top-10 battle-tested benefits of real estate legacy system modernization for your proptech business.

Maximized Real Estate Efficiency

Revamping legacy systems and transforming them into cloud-based and up-to-date products helps real estate brokers automate daily real estate workflows, avoid human factor risks, skyrocket business efficiency, and streamline any real estate activity, from loan origination and underwriting to document management and investment-related operations.

Embracing New Technologies with Integrations

Integration opportunities also enable real estate companies to bring tech-fueled innovation and digital tools into day-to-day proptech workflows. Embracing brand-new technologies and modern third-party integrations helps adopt must-have AI-driven technologies for data-driven prediction and enhanced decision making, handpick and implement tailor-made CRM systems for streamlined customer relationship operations, and integrate other industry-related infrastructure required for growth and scalability.

Budget-Friendly Spending In Real Estate

Modernizing real estate legacy systems unlocks budget-friendly resource management through transforming non-optimized and no-longer-supported on-premises software into cloud-based, easy-to-scale, and pay-as-you-go modern solutions.

Real estate businesses no longer need to spend fortunes on software maintenance and support along with costly functionality releases and time-consuming deployment. Having revamped your system, you can utilize allocated resources for strategic initiatives like launching the product to new markets, upgrading it with brand-new customer-centric features, and conducting successful product marketing strategies to boost awareness and grow sales.

Productivity Boost to Maximize Output

Upgrading legacy systems in real estate helps property firms skyrocket the productivity of the product team members. Up-to-date, easy-to-adopt, and feature-rich digital solutions streamline and automate daily operations for brokers, minimize the task completion time, and free up extra hours for dealing with value-added activities that maximize the output for your real estate business.

Superior Real Estate Service

Customer service also becomes a growth point while upgrading your legacy software as streamlined workflows, automated sales pipelines, and enhanced promotion capabilities help companies bring customer service to the next level. Proptech firms can boost response rates, increase retention, grow customer loyalty, enhance brand credibility, and thus uplift ROI, revenue, and sales.

Data-Driven Approach to Unlock Growth Potential

Upgrading legacy platforms also helps real estate startups, brokerages, venture capitals, and operators leverage data-driven insights, predictions, and trends to boost performance. Multiple insight-fueled technologies and tools enable proptech businesses to make more informed, data-driven, and business-customer balanced decisions thus leading to improved resource allocation.

Real Estate Collaboration Synergy

Internal collaboration shortcomings are no longer a challenge for real estate companies leveraging up-to-date and optimized proptech products. Modern systems help facilitate internal communication, improve data sharing, and enhance collaboration synergy that help improve the decision-making process and boost productivity and efficiency across all departments.

Power of Greater Agility

Outdated and no-longer-supported systems leave no space for real estate vendors to drive agility and adaptability. Shifting from legacy systems to modernized and scalable tech-fueled products help providers respond to ever-changing market conditions in a lightning-fast manner while catering to customer expectations. This provides you with an additional competitive edge and enables you to outperform competitors down the road.

Real Estate Security Upgrade

Sensitive data sharing and leakage risks become a headache for most outdated legacy system owners as these platforms are error-prone and give a lot of room for hackers to attack. Revamped real estate digital products help anticipate and minimize security-centric shortcomings as they provide powerful data encryption protocols and are fully compliant with most regulations for efficient operation in the proptech landscape.

Who Benefits from Hiring Real Estate Legacy Systems Experts

Real Estate Companies

Real estate vendors are among the core audiences to benefit from hiring real estate legacy system experts. Multiple vendors are still utilizing outdated software that has been effective in the past, but now barriers inovation and growth.

Vetted experts with solid background in revamping real estate legacy systems help companies identify outdated product parts, assess their needs, and migrate from on-premises to cloud-based solutions. This leads to enhanced efficiency, reduced costs, and enables real estate vendors to return their market-leading positions with customer-centric and engaging proptech products.

Property Management Firms

Providers dealing with portfolio and property management can also benefit from hiring domain-based experts to renovate their products. Property management vendors mostly rely on complex systems designed to manage properties and large data bundles while outdated systems often lead to stability errors, performance gaps, and low data accuracy.

For example, a property management company might hire a tech-savvy software modernization expert to help them either migrate outdated software to cloud-based infrastructure or implement a brand-new platform for efficient tenant and lease management, streamlined repair management, automated record keeping, and superior property marketing activities.

Commercial and Residential Landlords

Revamping legacy systems also benefits commercial and residential landlords. First, they can transform offline-only property management into digitally-enabled remote-powered administration and monitoring of properties. This allows them toallocate more time for value-added real estate activities.

Second, real estate software modernization experts help enhance financial management through automated rent collection and expense tracking that eliminates potential human factor risks and prevents landlords from spending extra time and money on financial management.

Third, upgrading legacy software helps landlords bring property marketing and leasing efforts to the next level by utilizing multiple listing solutions that help outreach to a wider audience and connect with potential vendors efficiently.

Real Estate Brokerages

Real estate brokerage businesses hardly rely on tech solutions to manage their daily operations and serve clients effectively. However, outdated and hard-to-scale legacy software brings multiple roadblocks to efficient buying, selling, leasing, and renting of properties.

First, real estate brokerages can benefit from software modernization by leveraging automated workflows to eliminate most manual-only tasks and human factor risks.

Second, companies can leverage enhanced data management to store, organize, and access data more easily and efficiently. This upgrade benefits the entire real estate brokerage process from internal data management to enhanced customer service.

Third, upgrading legacy systems can help real estate brokerages enhance security. Error-prone legacy systems with data leakage risks minimize client retention rates as tenants value their data privacy and carefully choose the vendor to cooperate with. This way, renovated real estate products help brokerages protect sensitive data from cyber threats and ensure full compliance with the required regulations.

Updating Legacy Systems: Tips & Best Practices from PropTech Experts for Real Estate Professionals

Here are the battle-tested tips and best practices from Ascendix’ vetted proptech experts for real estate professionals willing to digitize and renovate their legacy systems.

Thorough Assessment-Based Approach

Before turning to renovating your real estate legacy software, audit the current product architecture and processes you need to modernize. This will help you create a project roadmap and identify more bottlenecks and growth points to consider while updating the system.

For example, if you need to upgrade legacy software for streamlined customer service and automated real estate workflows, software assessment can help you identify analytics gaps and low marketing potential. This helps expand the project roadmap and embed more scalability for unlimited growth of your proptech business in the future.

Full Engagement with Stakeholders & Influencers

Revamping real estate legacy systems is likelt to have a large impact on the entire real estate business so engaging product stakeholders is a must. Before software modernization, conduct group-based and peer-to-peer interview sessions to deliver a shared vision of product deliverables that will impact the modernization plan.

As a result, engagement with stakeholders and internal product influencers helps sharpen either the migration steps or the from-scratch implementation of your real estate product.

Scalability-Driven Approach: Focus on Grow-Ready Solutions

Before renovating your real estate legacy software, consider the required scalability level you’ll need in the upcoming years. The real estate world is a fast-paced industry with ever-evolving market trends and challenges that require having highly-scalable products for lightning-fast adaption down the road.

This means you should focus on grow-ready solutions and services your revamped product will need to compete in a barrier-free way with your forward-thinking rivals.

Calculate TCO: Follow A Smart Real Estate Investment Model

When it comes to renovating your real estate legacy systems, Ascendix’ proptech experts recommend focusing on the total cost of ownership along with the basic upfront costs. The entire TCO includes ongoing maintenance, support, training, migration, and integration costs associated with your brand-new product.

Case Study: How Ascendix Helped JLL Increase User Adoption by 6 Times

Ascendix has over 16 years of hands-on experience in real estate, from proptech software development to legacy software modernization, migration, and automation. Trusted by market-leading proptech players like JLL and Colliers, our real estate tech experts have solid expertise in helping early-stage startups, SMEs, and enterprise-level corporations increase CRM adoption by 6 times, boost web sign-in rates by 200%, and double the service delivery speed.

Here’s a success story on how we helped JLL, a best-in-class and global property and investment management company, modernize its real estate legacy system and migrate it to the cloud.

Initial Requests

Jones Lang LaSalle contacted Ascendix in 2010 to help them streamline CRM data usage processes and integrate real estate information into their system to track properties, leases, sales, and other proptech-related objects in a lightnng-fast and cost-compressed manner

Challenges & Pitfalls

• Overall complexity of custom software development and cloud migration process
• Other vendors were unable to provide a full software development cycle
• Struggled with finding battle-tested tech talents with real estate expertise
• Poor communication level between JLL and a dedicated software development team.

Solutions

• Custom CRM App on Top of Dynamics 365. We helped JLL address the different needs of multiple locations and built a custom CRM app —SmartClient—on top of Dynamics 365. Our UI application provides all the needed functionality for commercial real estate brokers and different configurations for each location making it a super cost-and time-efficient solution for hundreds of corporate offices and dozens of countries where JLL operates.

• Duplication Detection Tool. We developed a powerful tool that automatically monitors the centralized database for similar records when users create a new contact, company, property, availability, etc. This functionality is a real-time wizard that compares the filled-in data with the existing records in the database. If there’s an exact match, the system will flag it to the user. In such a way, our duplication detection tool provides brokers with a flawless user experience and helps them speed up their daily workflow.

• Lightning-Fast Brochure Generation Tool. We implemented a report generation tool which allows brokers and clients to create a visually-appealing and detailed PDF brochure or tour guide by pulling information right from the CRM database. End-users can choose whether to download a PDF file or send it via email to clients and prospects within a few clicks. Besides, the tool provides multiple built-in templates with general information and map view for multiple property types that brokers can reuse in the future for a faster generation of eye-catching brochures.

• Powerful Opportunity Management Application. We have solved the company’s challenge of ineffective creating, analyzing, and managing opportunities in their CRM system. We built an easy-to-use opportunity management tool that simplifies this process and provides even more flexibility.

Results

• JLL increased user adoption by 6 times
• Created custom tools for automating business processes within commercial real estate
• Advanced customization abilities for hundreds of JLL offices worldwide
• White-glove concierge, 24/7 support, and operations teams
• Helped the company to migrate its data from on-premises hardware to cloud hosting on Amazon.

Final Words

Real estate legacy systems can be a major hindrance to digital transformation in the proptech domain. Outdated systems often lack the functionality and flexibility needed to keep up with the fast-paced and constantly evolving nature of the real estate market.

However, revamping legacy software and embracing digital renovation of current proptech software helps solving multiple shortcomings down the road and provides great perks: cost reduction, enhanced productivity and efficiency, maximized ROI, growth points and competition opportunities, and real estate business agility.