Summary
Zinhaus is a property management company operating in Germany, dealing with more than XX objects across the country.
While the business itself was successful, increasing amounts of data made management and paperwork a nightmare and the company was looking for ways to digitalize its operations.
Here’s how Impltech brought Zinshaus’s vision to life and helped them scale their operations efficiently.
The Challenge
Real Estate management is inherently data-heavy. Companies need to store and utilize financial information, contacts, property photos, checks and payment confirmations, property, buyer, seller and tenant data, bank applications e.t.c.
A large percentage of this data is stored on physical data mediums, which need to be handled by employees, scanned and copied, not even mentioning only being accessible at a certain location.
With the increase in operation size, data amounts increase proportionately and handling them becomes a colossal task requiring immense amounts of labour.
Administrative delays, hard data accessibility, heavy paperwork and general inefficiency have been plaguing Zinshaus for years.
All documents had to be created manually, which took a lot of time and allowed for human error which resulted in even more delays.
Ever increasing amounts of Data forced the business to look for an alternative solution to making all calculations and storing all data in excel sheets.
Having tried existing Customer Relations Management systems and Cloud Solutions from Google and Microsoft, Zinshaus quickly realised that none of them were suitable for the specific needs of the Real Estate industry, which prompted them to seek expert assistance.
Zinshaus came to us looking to create a consolidated data storage solution that will allow for:
- Comprehensive evaluation of the potential investment
- Detailed check and data aggregation of a potential investment
- Transaction support (getting, storing and forming all documents)
- Property management (Making all data orderly and readily available)
- Financial approval (creating everything a bank needs to approve a loan)
- Measuring KPIs of the investment (return, cashflow, taxes etc)
The Solution
Once the goals were clear, we set out to understand all the business processes of Zinshaus, how it operated, it’s business goals, where the external communications happened, e.t.c.
To achieve this, our development team cooperated with the people from Zinhaus to get a better grasp of what’s most important for them, what has the largest effects on their bottom line, what takes most time and how exactly these processes are conducted, step-by-step, where they feel those processes can be improved, and so on.
Once we had a good grasp of the company operations, we proposed some improvements to their processes, went over how each of them can be digitized, and agreed upon what should be included in a Minimal Viable Product. The development of it took X month.
Having seen what’s possible, the client came up with more and more processes and procedures that they were doing manually, and the answer to “Can we do it?” was almost always a definite “Yes!”.
After Zinshaus tried the MVP, they decided to expand the scope of the contract to include all business operations of Zinshaus as well as some features we proposed after getting an intimate understanding of their business model and goals.
The main feature was a Predictive Algorithm able to forecast the returns, cashflow, maintenance and other Key Performance Indicators of an investment for up to 20 years ahead.
The Scenario Builder allows investors, owners and property managers to create predictions for the possible Key Performance Indicators and potential changes to them over the years.
Interest rates, price changes, increase in rental value, are only some of the KPI that this algorithm can forecast.
It allows Zinshaus to see how their property or a portfolio of properties would develop and which impact it will have on their overall business KPIs like cashflow, average ROI, revenue, e.t.c.
This makes decision making data-driven and more accurate.
“The work that required cooperation of various people over several departments can now be done in seconds with a few clicks of a mouse. If you told me this was possible before, I would have laughed in your face“
Patrick Heinold, Managing Director, Zinshaus GmbH
He notes that the adoption of the platform was almost seamless, as employees eagerly jumped at opportunity to save time and effort.
“We’ve been using excel sheets since the inception of the company, some of the people were with us for more than 15 years, so I thought the transition process would be much harder than it turned out to be”, Patrick says. “The combination of an intuitive User Interface and professional guidance from Impltech helped us completely transition in two weeks”
Statistics are the best advocates for the benefits of digitalization, so here is a comparison of Zinhaus internal process efficiency before and after it went digital.
Having used Zinhaus for some time, Patrick Heinold has noted the following changes.
“Now Zinhaus has literally no paperwork, which resulted in happier, more motivated and productive employees.”, he shares. “We are also much faster at everything, from handling complaints and issues of renters to getting bank approval for financing.”
“If the employees were often overworked previously, now they can do everything on time, even when there’s much action”, Patrick muses.
“I foresee no troubles scaling our operations further now.”
The Results
Skipping ahead, see Zinhaus internal process efficiency comparison before and after it went digital.
Traditional workflow
Digitalized workflow
Loan Application Process
14-30 days
Loan Application Process
1 day
Real Estate Transaction Process
1-2 months
Real Estate Transaction Process
7 days
Manual Document Creation Process
(Tax reports, Applications)
1-3 days
Automated Document Creation Process
(Tax reports, Applications)
Seconds
Dedicated Tax-/Accounting advisor
No Dedicated Tax/Accounting advisor
No readlily available KPI for properties
ROI, cashflow, taxes, e.t.c. available in real time.
Information spread out across dozens of Excel
sheets and non-digital mediums
All information readily available on the platform and accessiblefrom anywhere.
Traditional workflow
Loan Application Process
14-30 days
Real Estate Transaction Process
1-2 months
Manual Document Creation Process
(Tax reports, Applications)
1-3 days
Dedicated Tax-/Accounting advisor
No readlily available KPI for properties
Information spread out across dozens of Excel
sheets and non-digital mediums
Digitalized workflow
Loan Application Process
1 day
Real Estate Transaction Process
7 days
Automated Document Creation Process
(Tax reports, Applications)
Seconds
No Dedicated Tax/Accounting advisor
ROI, cashflow, taxes, e.t.c. available in real time.
All information readily available on the platform and accessiblefrom anywhere.
These are only some of the benefits of an all-encompassing solution tailored for Zinhaus’s business needs.
- business and property state overview
- forecasting of returns on investments in different types of properties
- customizable notifications
- secure access from anywhere
- both mobile and personal computer use
- property management
- financing
- accounting
- and much, much more.
The adoption of the platform was almost seamless, according to Zinhaus, as employees eagerly jumped at opportunity to save time and effort.
“The work that required cooperation of various people over several departments can now be done in seconds with a few clicks of a mouse. If you told me this was possible before, I would have laughed in your face”
Patrick Heinold, Managing Director, Zinshaus GmbH
He notes that the adoption of the platform was almost seamless, as employees eagerly jumped at opportunity to save time and effort.
“We’ve been using excel sheets since the inception of the company, some of the people were with us for more than 15 years, so I thought the transition process would be much harder than it turned out to be”, Patrick says. “The combination of an intuitive User Interface and professional guidance from Impltech helped us completely transition in two weeks”
Statistics are the best advocates for the benefits of digitalization, so here is a comparison of Zinhaus internal process efficiency before and after it went digital.
Having used Zinhaus for some time, Patrick Heinold has noted the following changes.
“Now Zinhaus has literally no paperwork, which resulted in happier, more motivated and productive employees.”, he shares. “We are also much faster at everything, from handling complaints and issues of renters to getting bank approval for financing.”
“If the employees were often overworked previously, now they can do everything on time, even when there’s much action”, Patrick muses.
“I foresee no troubles scaling our operations further now.”
Visualization
React
Redux
React Native
Java
Postgress
AmazonWS
GitHub
Sergej Hermoni is Managing Director and co-founder of impltech and the expert when it comes to business development in real estate and finance. He has a deep understanding of the customer journey and the development of optimal customer experiences. Sergej completed his business studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin and wrote several academic papers on financial market efficiency and portfolio optimization. Before impltech, he worked for several companies in Berlin, London and New-York and was responsible for digitalization projects at banks and insurance companies.
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