Real estate investment is a dynamic field that involves purchasing, owning, managing, selling, or renting any real estate or property for a profit. It’s a rather risky business if the investor isn’t aware of every factor involved in the entire process, which means each party involved requires total transparency throughout the duration of all steps.
Some real estate investors are much more successful than others. To achieve such a level of success, investors rely on having access to the right tools at the right time. Successful real estate investors use real estate investment software to give them an advantage over the competition and to make their own lives a bit easier thanks to technology.
This software generally helps real estate investors make better business decisions. It also analyzes potential financial performance, increases work productivity, and makes it easier to choose profitable properties, among many other features.
Choosing the best real estate investment software sometimes makes the difference between barely breaking even or generating consistent profit for investors year after year.
What Is Real Estate Investment Software?
Real estate investment software consists of platforms that assess many different and important areas of the business to help ensure that the investor has the ability to make informed business decisions at all times. This software then assists investors in analyzing potential deals, managing rental properties, and understanding the best moments to sell and hold their properties.
This type of software also allows them to keep track of all their gains and losses, generate detailed reports, improve efficiency, and increase productivity by providing powerful business insights. Real estate investment software is a great ally to today’s real estate investors, guiding them in the right direction both online and offline.
Real Estate Investment Software Main Features
Real estate investment software covers a wide variety of aspects related to the field. This means that the best software must contain a wide variety of powerful features. Some of the main abilities of real estate investment software include:
- Processing rental applications
- Running background and credit checks
- Promoting online listings
- Advertising/marketing solutions
- Collecting rent and vendor payments
- Analyzing potential real estate deals
- Tracking the financial status of the real estate portfolio
- Handling a variety of property types
- Storing and managing rental property, income, and expense-related documents
- Creating tax-ready financial statements
- Protecting business and customer data
Users looking for the best real estate investment software should ensure that their choice is cost-effective, easy to use, and available across multiple devices (desktop, Android, Apple). Responsive customer service is another indispensable feature required to help investors succeed.
Basically, real estate investment software should help simplify processes, enhance revenue streams, and monitor the performance of rental properties. Of course, the right software for one real estate investor might not suit another. Choosing the best real estate investment software also depends on the types of property handled and the investment strategies used.
Does Your Business Need Real Estate Investment Software?
While it is still possible to manage a couple of investments using a computer and a basic spreadsheet, it isn’t the most practical or professional way to work in today’s competitive (and digital) environment. Running an investment business in this old-school way opens modern investors up to errors and issues otherwise prevented with up-to-date technology.
Even smaller investors benefit from using real estate investment software. These platforms are the best solutions to help businesses scale up and grow to become larger entities. They help streamline operations, increase profits, and track the performance of all properties down to the very last cent.
What to Look for in Real Estate Investment Software
Real estate investment software comes in all shapes and sizes. There are many things to look for in these types of platforms depending on the needs of the business. From simpler models to all-in-one solutions, there’s a real estate investment software package for all investors.
To help narrow down the search for the right investment software, investors should take the time to consider and create a list of their specific needs to help them personally succeed. They should know which goals they want to achieve with the software, how well the system they have in place is working, and what areas they’d like to be more efficient in.
They should also consider whether they’d prefer a more hands-on or an automated solution as well as which devices they believe they’ll run the real estate investment software from. After finding the answers to all of these questions, they can then begin the search for the right investment software.
A good starting point is to compare and contrast each option regarding financial performance analysis tools, pricing structure, demo options, customer service and support features, and marketing modules. No one person in an investment firm should make this decision either. Every player has their own needs and program features needed to make their jobs more efficient and more reliable, so investment firm owners and decision-makers should take the time to hear what their employees prefer.
How Can Real Estate Investment Software Help Investors?
Real estate investment software definitely assists investors in a wide variety of ways. From house flipping to rental investing, the best real estate investment software options target different niches and help businesses excel within each of them.
When it comes to commercial property investing, these platforms provide property value analysis, cash flow analysis, report generation, house flipping and wholesaling costs, project management calendars, and profit projections.
For businesses involved in rental property investing, real estate investment software offers online rent collection, accounting, integrated rental advertising, and deal flow management information.
A good real estate investment software also seamlessly integrates with an existing CRM system, leveraging the power of both tools to acquire professional connections and manage industry relationships in real-time.
Who Uses Investment Software?
Real estate investment software is useful to a wide variety of businesses as well as a wide variety of job roles within each business. Asset managers, real estate investors, stakeholders, property owners, landlords, brokers, and property managers all benefit from the different features this type of platform offers.
Asset managers, real estate investors, and stakeholders use investment software to acquire financial and operational insights. With this tech, they’re able to reduce errors, mitigate risk, streamline asset analysis, maintain compliance with guidelines and regulations, and facilitate visibility through their portfolios.
Real estate asset managers, in particular, also use this type of software to sort out any errors in data collection and conduct research on potential investments. Investors and investment firms then use investment software to manage the investor relationship and maximize property value and investment returns.
Other professionals that greatly benefit from using investment software are property owners and landlords. They leverage real estate investment software to maximize the return on investment, the property value, or even both. This software is also helpful in daily responsibilities like lease, tenant, and operations management.
Developing Real Estate Investment Software for Your Business
Not all real estate investment businesses have the talent or means to develop custom real estate investment software for their clients. Designing and building high-quality platforms like these also requires a lot of time and effort.
In these situations, it’s generally a good idea to work with outsourcing providers available to help businesses develop real estate investment software. As with any outsourcing project, the process of developing investment software using an outsourcing provider takes the following steps:
- Finding the right outsourcing provider: Finding the right outsourcing provider requires a lot of research and due diligence on the hiring company’s behalf. Companies should consider the countries in which they want to base their outsourced operations, compare average salaries, and examine different portfolios from different outsourcing providers.The goal is to find a provider that offers a higher quality of talent at affordable prices. The outsourcing partner should provide a skilled team of developers that they can rely on to design a great product, expedite the creation process, and reduce the time to market.
- Communicating goals and needs: Communication is very important throughout the development process, and even more so at the beginning. Once the company chooses an outsourcing provider, they need to clearly convey the vision they have for the project, which goals they hope to achieve, and what needs they have. Taking this information into consideration, the outsourcing provider then chooses the best candidates for the development team out of their pool of experts to form the new outsourced team.
- Deciding on features: The first step in the actual development phase is to determine which features the real estate investment software should have. There are many to choose from, including investor reporting, modeling, fund management, and asset management. By now, the team of outsourced developers should have a good idea of the business’s needs and work toward designing a platform that has the ability to fulfill them.
- Developing the software: This is where the skills and experience of the outsourced development team come into play. They make use of their coding, computer science, software engineering, and other technical skills to create the real estate investment software that the company needs.
- Testing and deploying: Before launching the investment software, the outsourced development team needs to put it through multiple tests to ensure that it is working properly. In case they find any errors or room for improvement, this is the time to handle it. Following the completion of the testing phase, the company may then deploy the final product. At this point, the outsourced team of developers typically offers post-launch assistance and maintenance services as well as fixing any remaining bugs.
How to Hire Software Developers With BairesDev
Outsourcing software development is oftentimes game-changing for fast-growing small to medium real estate investment businesses. Increased productivity, high product quality, and time and cost savings are only a few examples of the advantages of working with an outsourcing provider.
For companies never having worked with an outsourcing partner before, it might seem a daunting task. However, it only takes a few simple steps to hire software developers with outsourcing partner:
#1 Defining goals
This is where the company clearly defines which goals they want to achieve by creating a new product. Leaders should consult with stakeholders and other company members to ensure that everyone shares the same vision.
#2 Preparing scope of work documentation
Even before reaching out to an outsourcing provider, the company should have a work plan. This involves setting up a budget and defining the necessary skills, experience, and other requirements.
#3 Shortlisting companies
Companies shouldn’t go for the first outsourcing provider they find. They should do some research and compare different options. Important points for comparison include business longevity, experience with tech, software development process maturity, methodology, English proficiency, time zone flexibility, and work portfolio.
#4 Signing the paperwork
After choosing the best outsourcing provider, all that’s left to do is to create and sign a contract. The paperwork should contain every detail regarding the development process, agreed security protocols, and other agreements like NDAs, MSAs, or SLAs.
Advantages of Hiring Software Developers With Outsourcing
Hiring software developers with outsourcing offers a wide variety of advantages to real estate investment companies.
One of the biggest benefits of working with outsourcing providers is the reduced costs. Most outsourcing partners work with experts that live in countries where the expected average salary is much more affordable when compared to the ones from the originating country of the hiring investment company.
They also help companies save a lot of money on space and infrastructure. Outsourced development team members already have access to all the tools they need to get the job done. The company also doesn’t have to spend any money on training in-house staff.
Another benefit of outsourcing real estate investment software development is saving time throughout the entire process. To begin with, the company doesn’t have to spend any time in extensive and intense recruitment processes.
Outsourced team members also put in a huge amount of work during their work hours. Having a dedicated development team like this expedites the development process and reduces the time it takes to launch the final product.
Flexibility and scalability are other great advantages of hiring software developers with outsourcing. These expert teams can quickly help scale the process up or down, depending on the real-time needs of the company.
While the development process is in the hands of the outsourced team of developers, in-house staff can focus their entire attention on core business tasks, increasing overall productivity levels.
Investing in Real Estate Investment Software — Final Considerations
Real estate investment involves purchasing, managing, selling, or renting real estate or properties for a profit. Successful real estate investors use advanced real estate investment software to get an advantage over the competition.
Real estate investment software allows investors to track gains and losses, generate reports, analyze potential deals, manage rental properties, and figure out the best moments to sell or hold on to their properties. Ultimately, these tools let real estate investors make informed business decisions.
The main goals of real estate investment software are to simplify processes, enhance revenues, and improve business efficiency. To achieve this, some of their main features include processing rental applications, promoting online listings, analyzing potential real estate deals, and creating tax-ready financial statements.
