As an award-winning commercial real estate investment and development firm, the company had more than 100 years of business experience—and a keen awareness of what it took to manage its real estate document flow. After selecting Arcuity’s REALTY|share real estate portal platform and working closely with Arcuity consultants to customize it to their needs, United Properties couldn’t be more pleased with the outcome.
United Properties began its search in the same way it seeks out new properties for its portfolio—with thorough evaluation. To assist in the effort, it hired a consulting company out of Dallas to identify its document needs, scope what the system might look like, and advise United Properties on a candidate.
The consultants recommended cloud-based SharePoint Online through Microsoft Office 365. United Properties accepted the recommendation, and the quest was on for a highly qualified SharePoint for Office 365 partner. “We were a bit unique in that we already had a document management system from our SharePoint 2010 implementation,” says United Properties IT Director Kevin Powell. “We were looking not just to replace our previous system, but also to evolve our document practice and have centralized quality control.”
“We had seen the REALTY|share solution at Realcomm and spoken with Anthony , so we asked for a demo,” Powell continues. “We were impressed with the base platform—it looked pretty familiar to our current solution and had some enhancements that we liked. It had 90 percent of what we wanted, and Arcuity’s team was ready to help customize it and make it our own.”
To develop the final solution, the Arcuity team worked closely with United Properties, exploring their current and future requirements before proposing the customized solution. To attain United Properties’ goals, the platform—and the implementation—would be complex. Because it involved the exchange of proprietary information, significant governance and change management would also be required.
Information related to properties and tenants would flow directly from United Properties’ accounting system into REALTY|share, where the platform would read specialized metatags, applied by the accounting system, and automatically create new records or update existing ones.
After import, the records would be fully searchable within the platform, enabling users to find any information they needed, quickly and easily. The system would also upload monthly financial reports from the accounting system, scan documents (OCR), run nightly lease abstracts, and more. “The new platform performed about 44,000 jobs in the first six weeks it was online,” Powell reports.
REALTY|share has transformed the way that United Properties handles its document management. It automatically decodes Document IDs applied by accounting, applies embedded metadata, titles the documents and routes them to the correct property site and library. A full complement of intelligent reports can be generated, as well, on demand or on a schedule.