admin In business, innovative new digital strategies are constantly being rolled out as organizations put their best foot forward. Consumers and savvy competitors have embraced new technologies. Business growth is not only supported by the efficient implementation of the digital, but comes to rely on it as well.
But in traditional brick-and-mortar businesses like real estate, the transition has proved slow.
“A lot of real estate companies manage their projects based on old practices,” Simeon Garratt, CEO and co-founder of real estate technology company Spark, explained. “Excel is one of the biggest pieces of software for a lot of developers… that’s not enough.”
While this might be sufficient for an independent agent dealing primarily in re-sale, larger companies who work with new developments—especially the high rise condos and town home communities of the world—are hard pressed to say the same.
Why new development needs new development software?
The sales and marketing of new development real estate often involves hundreds of contacts and dozens of units of inventory. This translates to countless hours spent making and sending email campaigns, creating registration forms and organizing buyer events, and painstakingly writing out long contracts for each individual sale.
And with the real estate market entering a new, slower stage of the cycle, developers are increasingly finding that a more efficient, data-backed process is necessary.
That’s precisely what Spark, and other proptech companies making a splash in new development technology, aims to provide. By giving developers and their sales and marketing teams a centralized platform where they can track buyers, deals, and inventory, Spark creates a unified hub of activity. This allows teams to digitize their entire process, making each real estate transaction more efficient, accurate, and clear-cut.
“We’re helping take an industry that is inherently based on pen and paper, and turning the whole process digital,” Garratt explains.
New development teams can move inventory faster, more accurately, and with more accountability—the platform’s reporting functionalities open up whole new realms of data that can inform top-level decisions on budgets, marketing, and sales initiatives.
Pushing the industry forward with technology
Instead of supplanting or cutting modern real estate away from its traditional roots, one of proptech’s most important contributions to the industry is its ability to support and improve on established processes.
Contracts are crucial to transacting real estate, but for most, those same processes have not been updated or changed since they were first introduced. Most contracts are still painstakingly handwritten, lengthy, and tedious documents.
Using a software like Spark, which has digital contracting capabilities, can go a long way to digitizing—and therefore simplifying—the process of creating and completing legal documents. Developers can populate contracts with a few clicks of a mouse. That includes pulling in the correct information from buyer and inventory databases; calculating commissions and deposit structures; and even creating additional forms that require signatures.
“We speed up the process,” Garrett says, “Some of our clients have done more than 300 deals in a day this way, while traditionally it would take much longer to go through each contract, to make sure they’re all accurate.”
Buying into proptech for the sake of it can be a dangerous, budget-killing practice. But with a clear understanding of how a piece of software can fit into and improve your existing processes, the real estate industry can push forward and utilize the technology to innovate for the future.
The Leading Proptech of Today
Real estate and technology form one of the most exciting intersections of today. Bridging the two industries, proptech is growing every year and improving the day-to-day processes of transacting home sales.
Real estate software like Spark CRM grew from a natural extension of necessity. Simeon Garratt and his co-founders realized that there was an unfilled technological niche in new development real estate. They created the software to meet and exceed those professional needs: a single platform incorporating a back-end CRM with custom sales reporting, inventory management, digital contracts generation, and email marketing.
“We’re at the forefront of real estate, development, and technology,” Garratt says proudly. “Spark’s clients build skylines. Through our platform, we have the rare ability to see the digital translated into the physical realm.”
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