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February 2, 2016 12:59PM

Staying Competitive in California

Over the past two years, a construction boom in California has been shaking the residential and commercial real estate market, in various ways. Skyscrapers and massive infrastructure projects are soaring in downtown San Francisco, industrial space is sprawling across Southern California, and multifamily properties are brimming in every major city and town up and down the west coast. Whether you’re a developer, property manager, or simply flirting with real estate investment, there are tech tools available to help you stay competitive and ahead of the curve.

Cutting-edge real estate software solutions like Yardi and MRI have specific tools designed to help manage your real estate projects at virtually every phase. Yardi’s Construction module and MRI’s Job Cost module, for instance, are justifiably popular solutions for many in California real estate construction. They allow you to manage the finances of general construction projects including contracts, budgets, loan draws, and progress billings. The solutions are also flexible enough to handle capital expenditure (or CAPEX) projects and both residential and commercial tenant improvements (TIs).

Real estate software can also deeply enhance your facilities management capability with preventative maintenance and inspections modules. Various technology solutions are used by California property managers to maximize the efficiency of maintaining seismic retro-fittings, solar panels, and other building equipment, and helping enable you to perform maintenance before issues are evident to tenants in this increasingly ultracompetitive market. What’s more, the device-agnostic mobility of these software systems makes managing your projects on site or on the go more productive than ever.

Real estate investors know all too well that, with every boom comes the likely bust, and real estate technology can help you plan for, survive, and even thrive in an oversaturated market. Rent pricing control features in some software solutions—such as RealPage’s YieldStar, Yardi’s RENTmaximizer, or Rainmaker’s LRO—allow you to benchmark your rent against comparable units in the area, using live, dynamic data to ensure your leases remain competitive.

Attractive, easy-to-use tenant portals have been proven to entice and retain residents who are seduced by the ease of reviewing leases, taking virtual tours, paying their rent, and initiating work orders, all online. There are many options for building a tenant portal. REdirect can help you sift through them. In an oversaturated rental market, these tools can often tip the competitive scales in your building’s favor.

Navigating through the various real estate software options can be an overwhelming endeavor. With all due respect to the Google gods—fellow Californians though they are—a simple Web search cannot help you determine which type of software is best for your real estate needs, and it certainly can’t help you customize it to ensure its maximum efficacy. Consultants like REdirect are pros at assisting clients through the software selection process.

If you’re riding the current California real estate construction wave—and don’t want to wash out—contact us today.