- What is property data?
- Is property data an asset or a liability?
- Property data and customer service
- Using property management software to your benefit
- Managing risks
- Strengthen your data with PropCo
What is property data?
In the simplest terms, property data is any information relating to a specific property or physical space. In the broader sense, it's all of the data your property business holds, whether on individual properties, tenants or landlords, all of which have the power to inform crucial business decisions.
Is your property data an asset or a liability?
Historically, there's been a lot of conversation about whether data is an asset or a liability. Strict GDPR and data processing laws have made people cautious of data and how to manage it, whereas, in reality, your data is often your biggest untapped asset.
Adopting the mindset that your data is an asset will open new opportunities for your business. Having it stored and categorised in a single source of truth will help you collate, analyse and make decisions in a timely manner.
Not only will it drive informed decision-making, but harnessing the power of data also allows you to boost efficiencies and foster innovation while keeping your overall business strategy front and centre.
But what happens if data isn't managed correctly? Not only do agencies not get the information they need to make well-informed decisions, but they also face falling foul of GDPR and the slew of regulatory changes introduced over the past few years, not to mention potential data breaches.
On top of that, you'll also need to keep your data quality and standardisation front of mind. If you simply have lists of uncategorised data, you're putting yourself at risk of it becoming uncompliant and you won't be able to extract the information you need quickly and easily.
Property data and customer service
Stellar customer service is now a necessity, not a nice to have. The best customer service must be standard in a highly competitive marketplace with much higher client expectations. If you use the data you hold well, proactive — rather than reactive — customer service becomes the norm.
How do you achieve that? You need to have a single view. As a simple example, you need to be able to see a list of all current tenants in one place. It’s too time-consuming and impractical to interrogate 10 different pieces of software and 50 records to assemble the list you need.
Siloed data is the biggest barrier to tapping into the value hidden away in your data. That’s why lettings agencies that want to scale need to have a platform-based system like PropCo. It's one consolidated data source, meaning all the information can be found in a click or two.
Using property management software to your benefit
What does harnessing the opportunities created by data look like in reality? Once you have all your data in one place, you can slice it in different ways to get various insights. For example, PropCo features automatic reminders for details such as EPCs, property licenses and gas safety certificates.
But the real magic happens when letting agencies use their tech platform to its full potential. For example, automate reminders and plan for when a dishwasher in a rental property will likely fail or when a house needs re-painting.
On the people side, data can keep an eye on tenant sentiment, flagging alerts when tenants might be unhappy because of the tone of their emails or if a maintenance request hasn’t been actioned within a specific timeframe. That frees up agents to concentrate their time where it's most effectively spent, rather than guessing what’s happening and getting a nasty shock when tenants don't renew their contract.
The level of insights from property data is staggering. Whichever aspects of your customer service you want to improve, harnessing the power of platform technology can be transformational.
Managing the risks
Our PropCo platform handles over £2bn of rental transactions annually, meaning the TBL team is obsessive about keeping data safe and secure. We ensure we only process essential data for our clients.
Data can become a liability not just through major issues like data breaches, GDPR or other legislative missteps but from simple everyday errors like entering the tenant’s name incorrectly into the system and then handling a request to fix that.
Using an intelligent platform solution with a tenant portal removes those daily, low-level issues that create admin hassle for agents and irritation for customers.
When GDPR was introduced in 2018, TBL introduced a raft of measures into the PropCo platform to ensure the highest standard of custodianship. We then turned our attention to making sure we enabled our customers to be good data custodians, too.
It’s only too easy for letting agencies to hold onto landlords’ or tenants’ personal information for too long. Automating that process and auto-erasing redundant data through your tech platform is a complete game-changer, saving agents time, money and hassle.
Right To Rent has been another data challenge for lettings agencies, requiring them to hold very sensitive personal data only while it’s needed. That’s another area where comprehensive platform tech can automatically remove liability from lettings agencies.
Strengthen your data with PropCo
If you're looking for a tech provider that supports your vision of harnessing data while remaining diligent, then PropCo is the answer. To find out how PropCo works and the benefits it can deliver to your business, book a demo today to experience it first-hand and ask any crucial questions.
