Nowadays, it is possible to instruct your preferred suppliers with a much more precise scope of works than before. Proprli achieves significant project cost savings through automation, digitisation and increased transparency. This article explains how we accomplish this, and what lies ahead on our product roadmap.
Current state of the industry
Property management is changing! New technologies are constantly being developed, each with the common goal of better-enabling the modern property specialist to make the critical decisions associated with his/her job. As a real estate investment company, the focus needs to be on generating better returns than your counterparts in today’s extremely competitive market.
FROM A BLACK-BOX TO A CENTRALISED SYSTEM
When it comes to the technical management of their portfolios, most companies are still working in an old-fashioned manner. An external advisor or managing agent creates a scope of works in a static pdf-file, which is sent by email to relevant contractors and service providers. These contractors respond with their questions individually, again via email resulting in a black-box effect. As such, there is very little insight for the client which makes it difficult to work together efficiently.
In addition, it is old-fashioned for asset managers to be updated only once every quarter. By having access to a live budgets vs actuals overview, asset managers now can act upon changes in their portfolio.
Proprli platform
Proprli.com provides portfolio and project management tools to procure and manage your maintenance and capex projects. By working through a centralised system, you work more efficiently and save costs while ensuring greater compliance.
DIGITAL BID FORMS
Ultimately, the use of bid forms minimises budget overruns and systematically reduces project pricing, by leveraging the invaluable information locked within each of these past bids, which is collected and stored on the database.
Whether digital or static, the use of bid forms in tenders helps generate better quotes from bidding service providers. It makes the project scope clearer and gives the bidder a starting point to structure their bid. Following successful completion of bid forms, the results are easier to compare due to the quotes being provided in the same logical format.
This significantly reduces the volume of manual work associated with the later stages of the process, which is easily prevented by simply dedicating a bit more time and care during the tender phase.
CENTRALISED COMMUNICATION
Asset managers and property managers spend far too long updating one another, filling in spread sheets and tracking the progress of maintenance and capex projects. Most companies have introduced weekly update calls to manage personnel and the technical aspects of their projects, while continuing to work with static, outdated spread sheets, pdf files and through personal inboxes. With the arrival of digital project management these menial chores become redundant, with all team members working through one centralised platform.
Q&A
The importance of using a Q&A feature can be summed up in three key points. Firstly, because you want the provision of information to be equal for all bidders. Service providers post their questions on the module, where they subsequently receive answers from the client team. The questions get anonymised and reissued to all bidders. This results in every bidder receiving the same information and therefore the client receives more complete quotes.
Secondly, you do not want to answer the same, or similar questions twice. When you are not working through a Q&A module, it is impossible to prevent question repetition and thus duplicate explanations.
Thirdly, by working through a centralised system, it is much easier to hand-over a project to a team member. A team member can simply be given access to the tender, look through the project, tender and Q&A, and be up-to-date within no time.
What lies ahead? (Product Roadmap)
BENCHMARKING TOOL
Proprli receives all quotes in the most detailed digital format. By leveraging this big data, we will develop a benchmarking tool for our clients. For the first time, landlords and property managers will know with much greater accuracy the true cost of their projects.
The goal is to provide our clients with the actionable data to determine, how much a specific project in a particular region will cost and which contractors are best to invite. Ultimately, a tool of this nature will make the entire asset management process easier and more data-driven, from acquisition to disposal.
3D-MODEL INTEGRATION
We are constantly striving to help our client’s budget smarter and scope for the exact specifications of works required. 3D-models will help clients to minimise the margins contractors charge for guesswork and change orders thus reducing project costs further. This will all but eliminate any need to ‘wing it’ and provide users with a near exact scope of works on which to base their request for proposal (RfP).
In turn, by providing contractors with access to web-based BIM-models, they are able to quote sharper and provide the inviting client with a much completer and more accurate bid.
SERVICE PROVIDER RATING SYSTEM
By tracking vendors’ response rates, successful bids provided within the deadline, the completeness of their quotes and bid forms, it is possible to better understand your vendors.
Typically, a rating system incentivises vendors to answer and provide quotes in a more detailed and professional manner to their clients, as they are aware of the impact a bad rating can have on their business. (e.g. UBER, Airbnb)
