Value.

Ask me anything about technology or efficiency or automation or websites or whatever. If I do not know, I can find out.

Before that however, you have to have the basics. Today, you must be Informed and Equipped so you really do bring Value to your Properties, Facilities, Companies, Organizations. DO NOT bury your head in the sand. Spend this downtime getting really, really Valuable.

Every PM/FM professional must have and/or at least understand the below and its potential, both personally and professionally. How many of the below items can you articulate to an employer, employee, student, client, etc.?:

Anti Virus Software
Anti Malware
Anti Spyware
Computer Cleaning/Maintenance Tools and why
Automatic Microsoft Updates and why (sorry Apple, this is for the masses)
External Hard Drive + Automatic Back up + Additional Back up
FREE Online photo album
FREE Online document sharing
FREE Online calendar
FREE email account or two
The Twitter concept is not a stupid gimmick
Online PR Tools
FREE VoIP phone number and voicemail
FREE conference calling service
Online fax service
Why Notepad and html is so powerful
ISP = Utility
FREE Social Media account or two
Domain name
A website to call your own and a basic understanding of it
FREE tools for everything imaginable are everywhere

If any of this is of any interest to anybody, I am happy to go on and on and on with information. I do not want to freak you out or scare you, just make you and your projects better equipped.

I cannot imagine managing a property without the above under any condition. I need the above to function and manage my property as efficiently as possible.

Do others agree or am I just a freak here? If anyone wants to help me, jump in. If you think I am off base, just say so.

Thanks,
Linda@ManagerLabs.com

Well the property and facility management industry is inundated with acronyms: PM, FM, ROI, NOI, MLS, IREM, CCIM, BOMA, TI, LO, LOI, you get the drift. But now the industry is being exposed to terminology and acronyms that the tech world and many others, hopes will change the industry forever. The term is SaaS, or Software As A Service. In other words, an automation that is online and can be called a tool or portal. With SaaS, everyone is delivered the same software via a browser that you use for FREE or with a subscription, just like any other subscription service.

The point of SaaS is to actually provide service that enables you to automate or streamline the current process or method you are using today in your offices and improve service delivery and/or reduce your labor and overhead. For example, we all have heard of Lock Box, Multiple Listing Services (MLS), and Online Banking. Now the next generation of online technology has started with a multitude of products and tools that are above and beyond those traditional shared software, now online, products. The products vary from website portals that deliver template formats for property websites to payment processing and bill paying. Everything consumers have been enjoying at home for years! In addition, all of the Cloud products, such as document storage, email and online productivity applications are basically SaaS services as well. With the Property Management industry fraught with overhead and a multitude of remote sites, SaaS and Cloud should be on any companies radar as an alternative.

It is very exciting to find blogs, such as Software Advice where you can read about the Property and Facility Management industry and its migration to this evolution by our industry with technology. It is about time we get our act together and reduce our redundancy, provide 24/7/365 service to our customers, create standards, eliminate the pain of training, pool our resources, create economies of scale, and improve our accuracy. The author of the blog, Chris Thorman is a member of several groups I belong to on LinkedIn and I offered to share his basic and easy to understand article at his Software Advice blog for software advice to the Property Management Industry.

Consider joining our family of LinkedIn groups:

PFMI (Property and Facility Management Innovators)

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=1858850

–Vendor Bidding Lab (beta) subgroup of PFMI

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=2238793

–PFMC(Property Facility Management Companies) subgroup of PFMI

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=2644670

Rooftop Gardening

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=143300

Certified Property Managers (CPM Group)
Need to be listed in IREM Membership Roster.

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=138868

Join me at Maven Research too: https://www.mavenresearch.com/join/4G4Y4QmB

How healthy is your Organization’s Core? Every time you hear a ringing phone, think about it.  I would bet that if you attended Realcomm 2009 in Chicago over the past 3 days, you know exactly what I am talking about. If you did not attend, you MUST attend next year. Get out the coffee can and start saving your money. If your company cannot afford it, pay your own way. Visit www.realcomm.com for more information.

The well being of your corporate infrastructure depends on it! To survive your organizations core must now run 24/7/365. There is no more 9 to 5. It is obsolete terminology.  There is no time for processes to cease or take a break. Today is a 24/7/365 world and the pace is getting faster and more efficient. Is your infrastructure gaining speed or losing speed? Are you hearing ringing around your offices? If so, you need to focus and reduce those ringing phones.

Think about investing small sums by trading the wasted labor expense it takes for a permanent solution that can be used over and over again. Consider the growth opportunities if you can do more with less.  This is not about eliminating people at all. It is about retraining people and realigning people. Grow the business itself, not for the sake of growing the labor pool, as many of us have done in the past.

Our industry is jam packed with business intelligence and we need to discover and unearth it. Our industry holds the key to a massive opportunity for somebody, and that somebody should be you!  The data we all share and the information we all have is vital and it is being unearthed.

Everyone is now relating to one another 24/7/365 via the internet.  People no longer want to wait for your office to open at 9:00 a.m. That is almost silly to even think of today.  What is your own reaction to waiting or being told “No”? Ask yourself that question every time your phone rings. A ringing phone should truly be the bell that goes off in your head. If there is a will, there is the internet.  If you need something you go online and just get it.

You must invest in your Organizational Core. Automate tasks, digitalize Documents, minimize paper, embrace technology, and embrace the change. The challenge for us as an industry is three fold:  ego, money and awareness.  Ego for those that believe their way is better; money for those who have the money now and do not want to lose it (ie, large software companies that will soon be obsolete); awareness for those that do not know about the movement.

There are a few organizations pioneering industry wide standards that you need to be aware of:

Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate – (OSCRE) – http://www.oscre.org   “Deliver global standards for exchanging electronic real property information and drive their adoption”

Multifamily Information and Transactions Standard – (MITS) – http://www.mitsproject.com/ “MITS is an industry-wide effort by the apartment sector to develop common data standards and extensible mark-up language (XML) protocol to facilitate data and systems integration.

Realcomm – http://www.realcomm.com,  Jim Young, Founder. The intersection of Commercial Real Estate Corporate Real Estate, & Technology.

Manager Labs – http://www.managerlabs.com, Geoff Domoracki and Linda Day Harrison, CPM, CCIM, Founders. Where the concepts of the future, become a reality for the industry today. An organization dedicated to providing all PM / FM firms and related Vendor Services, the opportunity to embrace technology, identify technology and utilize technology before they buy the technology. Bring your need or idea to this group and we will execute it as a prototype to prove out its effectiveness and ROI.

Each of these organizations are progressive, consciously and consistently providing the cutting edge to our industry. Your Organizational Core is depending on you.  Keep your core healthy and consider any and all the baby steps that are available to embrace the new ways.  Almost all of our mundane and redundant efforts can be automated. Going forward make a pact with yourself to think about your Organization’s Core and whether or not your decisions and actions are working towards a healthy core. Test yourself and watch what is physically going on around you and every time you hear that ringing phone, think of it as your wake up call.

When your day is spent trying to revolutionize an industry, it can be rather exciting yet a little frustrating at the same time. Not only do you have to get the word out to millions of people, but you also have all of those who ignore you when they hear ‘change’. Those people may agree with you that they want everything to be done faster and cheaper, so long as it stays the same. We always start out by reminding them that there can be very little progress without change, but it is hard for them to swallow that part of progress as it relates to changing anything. Progress they want, change they do not want. In order for a property manager to be able to say, Yes and Now to each customer, building owner, staff member, vendor, leasing broker or anyone they encounter, there must be a monumental change within the industry to make this dramatic progress a reality. We are hoping, like so many people, that by adding Greening to the concept it might take off. It seems that anything about Greening or The Environment is popular. As property managers we need to start Greening ourselves.

For us to become a green industry our effort will be more than just recycling, it will have to include creating standards, minimizing training, eliminating redundancy, identifying the appropriate tools and stopping the madness of starting over every time a new property is assigned to us and minimizing the horrific pain when a property is taken away or sold. If and when, we as an industry, empower ourselves as property managers to provide Yes and Now solutions, there will be a great efficiency or greening of the property management world. The greening will take place throughout every facet of the physical property as well. The greening will impact actual costs and improve customer retention, lower employee turnover and increase the actual value of the property if we all pull together and green this industry.

For over 2 ½ decades I have been in property management, with the majority of those years in the field, at the frontline. The frontline is an appropriate description of those persons in a company who deal with the customers. When you are at the front, the demands come from various directions. Those challenges come from the general public, existing customers, building ownership, the local municipality, the corporate office, vendors or even our own property staff, and usually all at the same time. There is a constant barrage and an endless flow of expectations, with internal conflicts. Herein lies the problem or dilemma.

For instance, the customers expect us to be at our desk at all times to answer their questions or answer the phone when they call. The building owner wants us to walk the property each day and insure all things are in top condition, while watching every single penny spent and every single penny collected. The property manager is also held accountable for each member of the building staff and the assurance to ownership and our corporate office that the staff is being supervised with eagle eyes. Those high standards are expected at the on-site office we are assigned to, in addition to the other 6 properties we manage.

The corporate office wants reports done on time so the accounting department is insured immediate response to their inquiries or needs. When a broker inquires about space available, those tenant rep brokers want the answers now. The local municipality expects us to be at the ready and drop everything, on a moment’s notice to do a full building or fire inspection so we comply with all codes and ordinances. All of the vendors want to be paid immediately after performing their services and the vendors will call repeatedly until we can tell them the exact time they will be paid. Simultaneous to this we are listening to the property leasing broker on the other line who is impatiently waiting for feedback on a 7 page, lease proposal that he/she needs to have our feedback on within the next 15 minutes. All while there is another tenant standing in the office appalled that the illegal car in their parking space has not yet been towed, along with the staff member who wishes to find out why their paycheck was shorted 1.5 hours overtime.

All of the above scenarios can be made less painful if we pull together and start a grassroots effort to revolutionize the property management industry and take the property manager out of the line of fire by igniting a movement towards creating an environment whereby the property manager or the frontline staff, can truly find the time to provide excellent customer service. In addition, immediate responsiveness to the general public, our customers, the building staff, the government, the corporate office and the vendors who all believe they are entitled to receive answers now and make us a Green industry.

Because the industry is bogged down with redundancy, limited standardization, dysfunctional tools, insane repetition and wasted motion, we are the biggest culprits of waste and ineffiency. Today, with all of the creative electronic gadgets and sleek cell phones, why is a property manager ordering 3-part NCR work order pads from Peachtree, bulletin boards to post notices, reams and reams of paper to print statements, newsletters and other legal notices, cases of timecards for the staff to punch in and punch out, binders to store records and logs, and tons of envelopes to mail out the paper coupon books, paper invoices, vendor paper checks and paper remittance stubs and letters imploring the vendors to provide the paper certificates of insurance or other vendor compliance requirements? The reason is simple. We are not creating cohesive systems or systems of any kind. With cohesive systems that communicate, the redundancy will be gone, the manual task will be gone, the errors will be gone and the service will be improved.

There is a group tackling these challenges right now. If you have heard of the organization Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate (OSCRE) you are on the right track. This group is taking the challenge head on. OSCRE understands the key is to create standards across all firms. OSCRE is doing this very task in a very impressive fashion. As a group, those of us at ManagerLabs.com are studying the OSCRE standards and investigating how we as web developers and technology innovators can embrace this profound effort to standardize the property management industry. In a conference call with one of the OSCRE leaders last week, we were given an overview of the various standards already in place. ManagerLabs.com will continue to monitor the OSCRE processes and keep spreading the word about this important step in the process of improving the property management industry. If you take the standards and connect this to all of our systems, we will all be able to share data across any database, no matter what accounting system, work order system, commercial listing service or lease abstract system.

Our mission at ManagerLabs.com is to connect all of these dots so things can truly be ‘touch it once’. Every aspect of managing any asset should be treated as a giant template. Once this template is in place, simply change the names and fill in the blanks. If we, as an industry can start looking at standards, practices, systems and procedures as templates, we can truly be a much Greener industry.

For more information on OSCRE or to join this group, visit http://www.oscre.org.

There may be some that wield high tech tools of sorts, but overall the property/facility management and commercial real estate industry is lacking the technology that would unleash power into its systems and processes.  Because we are so busy making our clients money, counting light bulbs and managing labor to the tiniest penny, we typically fall short of optimizing our workflow.  In my 25 years of experience, I have realized that the pathway for our industry to dig itself out of this low profit margin hole is by embracing the tools that exist today. It has always been my personal mission or desire to demonstrate that a property manager can go from 0 to 60 with the right tools and infrastructure at their fingertips, simultaneously providing clients and customers with a higher level of service.

There are managers who do not yet have automated work order systems, dispatch capabilities or automated monthly owner reports and early on in my career it became apparent to me that this inefficiency ultimately had an impact on the bottom line. It was in an office akin to a mini-Kinkos of sorts, producing upwards of 18 partners books per month, where I realized the gap that was emerging in our industry. I will never forget the moment when we were actually able to convince one single client to permit us to email a PDF to them. That was a huge milestone in my career and one I will never forget. We were so proud that out of 55 clients, one single client would permit such high tech delivery! This huge triumph over the antiquated way of business, opened my eyes to how cost effective and efficient things could now be given the technological advances. 

Despite the advances, our industry was still slow to adapt, and for me the gap between technology and the property managers became exceedingly more of a problem.  The way Property Managers operated was unnecessary, redundant and even absurd in some cases. Tasks that were taking days could take the click of a button, streamlining and accelerating my business, leaving me freed up to provide quality customer service; walking the property or meeting with potential new customers; working with leasing on creating new ways to lease our buildings; taking customers to lunch; working with programmers to develop a comprehensive and effective website; producing a newsletter; hosting a tenant retention activity; even staff training day.  All of these useful and creative projects had taken a backseat to the repetitive, wasteful functions that currently occur in the normal course of a property/facility manager’s day and the industry cannot afford to tolerate this any longer.

There are a few simple things that we can begin to adopt now that will take the industry from 0 to 60. The first is cross industry standards various templates for all of our databases and that will allow software systems to talk with each other. When all of our software is communicable, we will eliminate redundancy and exchange information with clicks instead of paper and laborious data re-entry. The second is connectivity and communication. It is not necessary for a manager to be tied to a desk, in fact a good property manager is mobile without compromising the inflow of requests or customer service needs. The manager is always available and reachable with the tools to dispatch requests and monitor the vendors or projects at all the properties they oversee.  The third is effectively utilizing the Internet as a fundamental component of customer service… Adopt these principles of standards, utilizing the Internet and management mobility and you will empower the property/facility management industry. Not only will you provide the speed and improve the quality, but you will provide your clients and customers with the excellent service they deserve from today’s up to speed, property/facility manager.