4 Benefits of Using a Real Estate Document Management System
Commercial real estate transactions involve large volumes of paperwork that must be signed and stored. In accordance with the law, certain documents must be stored for several years. As a result, paper documents can take up a significant amount of space and are often time-consuming to process and locate when necessary. In fact, business professionals use 50% of their time searching for information and take an average of 18 minutes to locate each document.
Without the proper storage and flow of documents, your firms could suffer from an increased likelihood of avoidable human errors, such as misfiled or lost contracts. Additionally, slow document retrieval or inaccessible financial agreements are more likely to occur because of the lack of an effective system. Forward-thinking and progressive firms agree that there has to be a better way to manage documents.
A real estate document management system enables firms to combine files into a single hub, to streamline business workflows, and to efficiently handle documents, allowing organizations and their investors to easily locate and extract key information. Specifically, RealPage IMS’ document management software eliminates inconsistencies by storing and managing each document in a centralized cloud-based repository. With this tool, firms can then access, manage, and process important documents such as K-1s, waterfall-audit files, and broker/property management docs from one secure location quickly and more effectively. This ultimately allows them to find docs within seconds rather than hours.
Read ahead to learn more about how modern investment firms can benefit from a document management system.
Enhanced Security
Security is a critical issue in storage and management of documents – and for obvious reasons. CRE professionals handle a lot of sensitive and confidential personal and financial information. They are also creating, using, storing, and sharing more data than ever before. Therefore, when documents are not properly stored and managed, the chances of proprietary and sensitive information being exposed to the wrong people are tripled.
The IMS document management tool has been architected to prevent security breaches by using banking and military level encryption, hosted in the largest and most advanced cloud hosting platform, and out cloud operations teams to ensure proactiveness in addressing potential security issues.
On-Demand Access
Commercial real estate is an increasingly global business in which investors need instant access to key information regardless of time zone and respective business hours. Additionally, modern-day investors require access to information when they are traveling, commuting to the office, or working from home. To address these demands, firms must leverage CRE tech to provide the 24/7, anywhere, anytime access that investors have come to expect. A commercial real estate document management system allows investors to retrieve key documents on-the-go. This allows them to instantaneously locate and identify their investment information at their fingertips and without a hassle.
Increased Efficiency
Managing and organizing commercial real estate documents can be time-consuming. Fortunately, a document management software is a powerful time-saving tool that can improve a firm’s overall productivity while reducing risk and error. Additionally, leveraging real estate document management allows firms to stay organized by eliminating inefficiencies created by manually managing files and paperwork. Having an electronic document system in place also eradicates the need to spend countless hours searching for misplaced documents. With document management challenges accounting for over 20% of all productivity loss, the time saved by using a document management system can be devoted back to value-add activities for the firm.
Remove Data Silos
Data silos are one of the primary causes of document management issues today. When documents are stored in separate computers, servers, or filing cabinets, it becomes difficult to find documents, compile data, or share information when necessary. You can easily unify the management of your documents with a cloud-based document management software. This type of system will consolidate your documents into a single access point, helping to eliminate internal silos of data by giving all or selected authorized personnel quick and easy access to documents.
Together, these benefits help to create a better investor experience and improve client relations. A commercial real estate document management system also enables the firm to be more scalable, with fewer manual processes as the company grows.
Unsure if your firm is ready to adopt CRE technology? Download this free checklist about CRE Tech Readiness to determine if you are ready to implement CRE tech at your firm.
