Quickly File Documents from a Central Location into Your REALTY|share Property Site

R|s Librarian

The REALTY|share Librarian empowers users to file documents from a central location and store those documents at the selected property site or sites. The Librarian will improve your Acquisitions Team “Property Closing” process by quickly and effectively filing documents in the selected library for a property with the required metadata fields, while making tax season a smooth breeze for your organization’s Accounting Department. For any questions on our new REALTY|share Librarian feature or REALTY|share document management system please click here.

Yardi Data Available Via Your SharePoint Portal

Consolidate Financial and Occupancy Data from Yardi, MRI, and Other Systems

Due to the COVID Year, real estate owners and owner/operators are leveraging their investment in the Microsoft platform more than ever before. Microsoft Teams has become the standard for conferencing and collaborating. And SharePoint is finally being recognized for the powerful portal and document management platform that it has been for years.

Companies that have gotten their feet wet with SharePoint as a corporate and property portal are learning about what’s “under the hood” and how this platform can help them make critical data available across the organization in a seamless yet secure manner.

Many of our customers are either Yardi or MRI shops. We are able to help them surface data from these systems via their SharePoint portal. Examples include property financial data, occupancy data, vendor information, and tenant rolls. 

Most employees don’t have easy access to Yardi or know how best to access the information they need to get the job done. The days of requesting pdf (or dare we admit, paper) copies of common property reports should be a thing of the past. 

If your company licenses Microsoft Office 365 (and the vast majority of real estate companies do), please fill out this form so we can discuss how Arcuity can help you quickly and efficiently make property data and documents available via your corporate portal.

Use SharePoint Without Ever Having to Open Your Browser

Store and tag documents quickly into SharePoint Online while leveraging REALTY|share Desktop. Our tool integrates SharePoint with Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Adobe (PDF) and includes a “Windows-like” File Explorer for a complete document and email management solution.

Use Microsoft Teams to Collaborate on Documents and Store Final Version in SharePoint Repository

Microsoft Teams

In today’s environment working remotely is a key factor to success and Microsoft 365 and Teams has answered the call to help enhance and streamline collaboration. In this video the REALTY|share team shows you how quick, effective , and easy it is to collaborate with your team members inside of the REALTY|share platform, the industry’s only Office 365/SharePoint document management and portal solution exclusively built for real estate companies.

Microsoft Office 365 as a Foundation Technology for Real Estate Information Management

Perhaps it’s generational; maybe it’s education; You could call it necessity – always the mother of invention.  Whatever the cause, the last few years have seen a significant spike in the adoption of technology in the real estate space.  As a result, the market has responded by inundating the industry with a proliferation of new products and solutions.

Many of these new products are cloud-based “point-solutions’.  They address a very specific, finite source of inefficiency by automating a single process or presenting data targeted to one audience.  The products are marketed directly to the target audience who are naturally excited to see a resolution to their current pain.

Nimble real estate owners and owner/operators with decentralized purchasing decision-making lack the IT governance maturity of larger firms with a dedicated CIO or VP, IT position.  As a result, seemingly elegant and viable technology products are brought into the organization without an holistic evaluation of TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) or assessment of such unintended consequences as security implications, data integrity, user access management, and other governance considerations.  Furthermore, the cost consequences of SaaS (“Software as a Service”, cloud-based) products become quite onerous as the company continues to accumulate solutions that address individual business problems.

Forward-thinking real estate companies recognize that the answer to IT product proliferation is standardization around a select few core platforms.  One of these core platforms is necessarily the chosen property management and accounting system.  The other major core platform is the Microsoft Office 365 suite.

It used to be that Office 365 (or O365) was thought of as synonymous with email.  Today, however, O365 is a vast suite of capabilities integral to how an organization does business.  Depending on the chosen licensing package, O365 could include tools for email, real-time collaboration, video conferencing, document management, portals, business intelligence and data visualization, workflow, and many more.

Imagine this scenario:  A real estate firm enters the due diligence phase for the acquisition of a new property.  Using O365, they provision a new property portal that automatically generates a list of tasks based on a due diligence template.  The portal includes a folder for storing due diligence documents.  After the property acquisition is complete, the asset manager can access all financial and occupancy reports via this property portal.  They can collaborate with other members of the organization on the generation of the quarterly investor report and then easily email this report to a list of investors.  Property managers can track work orders and other property tasks directly from the portal.  Users can see a list of all tasks assigned to them across the entire portfolio.   External third parties (i.e., attorneys) can login to the system and add, edit or view only the documents they are given permission to access.

The above scenario is realized with REALTY|share, from Arcuity.  REALTY|share is built exclusively for real estate companies on the O365 suite.  REALTY|share allows real estate companies to maximize their investment in this O365 suite and delivers a framework to extend the capabilities of O365 to meet their other business needs as they arise.  For example, when a business user or department identifies a function that can be made more efficient through automation, there is a strong likelihood that the O365 platform can be extended to address this use case, obviating the need to license another software package and assume all the costs and consequences that this would entail. By standardizing on O365 as a core platform, real estate companies can leverage their Microsoft investment and recognize a wide range of business function solutions without having to continually add new and expensive technologies to their IT portfolio.  And by licensing REALTY|share from Arcuity, real estate companies will ensure that they are beginning with the industry’s best practice implementation of O365.

Ensure your organization is storing documents in a consistent, repeatable structure for all your assets

What’s more frustrating, not being able to find a document or not knowing if the document is the latest version? With REALTY|share, the industry’s only Office 365/SharePoint document management system you can create a consistent repeatable structure for all your asset documents and eliminate those issues. In this demo the REALTY|share team walks you through how this is done on the platform.

Abel Solutions Launches Arcuity, an Innovator in Technology Solutions for the Real Estate Industry

The company will provide real estate developers and management firms with first-of-its-kind document management, workflow and collaboration tools based on Microsoft 365

ALPHARETTA, GA—September 13, 2020—Abel Solutions, Atlanta’s premier consulting firm helping customers maximize their investment in the cloud, today announced the formation of Arcuity, a partnership between Abel Solutions and its parent company, ATS. Arcuity will assume responsibility for Abel Solutions’ real estate vertical activities, including the REALTY|share product, Abel Solutions’ flagship offering for real estate firms.

Arcuity will be led by Kevin Abel, founder of Abel Solutions, and Anthony Magee, who formerly managed Abel Solution’s real estate practice.

“Abel Solutions is excited to have Kevin Abel back on the team focusing on an industry that has always excited him, and Anthony Magee has been a key contributor to REALTY|Share’s success since its launch,” said Abel Solutions President David Hammond.

“We look forward to the synergy working together.”

Arcuity’s REALTY|share is the only Microsoft Office 365 solution built exclusively for real estate. REALTY|share includes document management, collaboration and workflow portal functionality, allowing real estate companies to address the precise features needed to jump start their approach to each asset’s full life cycle.

Flexible and fully customizable, it enables firms to streamline disparate systems, creating an efficient and centralized approach to collaboration between internal employees and outside vendors alike. The solution was designed to grow and evolve in partnership with each organization, empowering them to easily enhance productivity and increase customer satisfaction.  

“The real estate industry is entering a period of technology renaissance,” said Abel at the announcement. “This is a moment when companies that combine business acumen and technology value can have a significant impact. Arcuity is such a company.”

About Abel Solutions

For 25 years, Abel Solutions has focused on helping our customers develop and deploy solutions that deliver Business Excellence in terms of profitability, productivity, and competitive leadership. We believe that the most effective solutions are those that leverage and combine a customer’s current strengths and assets with new people, process, and technology capabilities to accomplish business goals. Our consultants have the knowledge, experience, and tools to deliver a portfolio of services including business strategy, collaboration solutions, dashboards and analytics, and managed cloud and IT services. To learn more about partnering with Abel Solutions, go to www.abelsolutions.com.

About ATS

Applied Technical Services Inc. (ATS) is a world-class, technologically advanced consulting engineering, testing, and inspection services firm. With headquarters in Marietta, GA and over 20 branch offices and over 900 employees scattered throughout the U.S., ATS has established an excellent reputation within the commercial, industrial, and legal communities for taking a closer look with our metallurgy, materials testing, chemical analysis, non-destructive testing, forensic and consulting engineering, fire and explosion investigations, and calibration services. For more information, visit www.atslab.com

Arcuity to Exhibit at Realcomm 2018; Demonstrate Innovative Real Estate Process Management Solution, REALTY|share

REALTY|share was designed and developed to empower real estate firms by providing
invaluable order, efficiency, and insight for their real estate operations.

Alpharetta, GA, May 31, 2018— Arcuity, Atlanta’s only firm delivering value-focused workflow and process efficiency accelerators for the SharePoint platform, today announced it will be an exhibitor at Realcomm 2018, where it will be demonstrating its revolutionary REALTY|share business accelerator.

REALTY|share is a secure, comprehensive real estate process, content management and collaboration framework built on Office 365 and SharePoint and powered by Nintex workflows. It helps firms gain management and oversight of real estate resources while keeping clients, partners and investors up to speed.

“Commercial real estate firms are under the gun not only to maintain and manage their portfolios efficiently but also to satisfy the demands of investors, partners and clients,” said David Hammond, president of Abel Solutions. “REALTY|share is proven to be 100% successful in helping real estate companies painlessly streamline their processes—from organizing and accessing resources internally to providing updates and insights through a feature-rich information portal.”

REALTY|share Highlights:

  • Organize documents securely across deals, with version management to eliminate duplicates.
  • Track checklists and deal-related action items, from due diligence and construction checklists to tax returns, investor reports and other deliverables.
  • Access content in the office or remotely, via browser, desktop or mobile device.
  • Manage and track contacts and contact activity—investors, properties and more.
  • Locate documents easily with Google-like search functions.
  • Securely share any document—and other information—with third parties: investors, lawyers, contractors and architects.
  • Extract and organize key metrics to view powerful insights about properties and their activities through dashboards, reports and scorecards.

Realcomm 2018 attendees can visit Abel Solutions and view REALTY|share demonstrations in booth #915.

Incorporating External Data in your Real Estate Management System

During the course of implementing one of our Business Solution Accelerators, REALTY|Share (a Real Estate Management portal based upon SharePoint or Office 365), for many of our clients we have been introduced to many business philosophy models within the real estate/property development industry. We’ve learned from our customers that our Business Solution Accelerator addresses the majority of their needs regarding their processes. Customers leverage REALTY|Share’s core functionality of property sites, Contact Management Module, My RE Portal, and our custom search center to handle document management and track property projects from a pursuit down to lease-up and disposal.

Even though philosophies are different from business to business, the hot item that remains consistent is the need to consume data from external systems, such as the financial data stored within the Real Estate industry standard systems such as MRI and Yardi, and display financial data as well as route documents from these sources into our real estate management system. By working with our partners, we have been able to provide a solution to answer that need.

We understand most Real Estate development projects start in one of these industry standard solutions, and when a project is created, each project is assigned an entity or project ID within the system. Real Estate developers can then associate other data points depending on the company operational guideline (such as property name, property address, property type, and square footage). To ensure our Solution Accelerator is easy to use and will be well received by end-users, we implemented functionality that connects to the external data source to retrieve those values and syncs them to REALTY|Share.

So why is this important? What value is this for my company? The answer is that now when you create new properties, you no longer need to maintain two systems. As you update your source of truth in your external system (such as MRI and Yardi in the case of many of our Real Estate clients), the changes you make there will be pushed down to your property sites within REALTY|Share. This function keeps data consistent between your industry-standard system and your document management system.

Now that your property financial data is stored within your intranet system and synced to receive updates/changes, you can start getting even more value from that data. Everything is housed in O365 and can be leveraged by the Microsoft tools such as Power BI. Power BI will give you the power to transform and display your data with graphical charts and dashboards, giving your executives a real-time snapshot of where the company currently is and how the company is trending.

We understand companies leverage multiple software solutions in their everyday work to get their jobs done. But working within REALTY|Share gives your team a single platform that offers the capacity for both tracking data and managing documents. Merging these two components into one platform allows your end users to effectively work within one portal instead of jumping back and forth in between systems, thus enabling them to work more efficiently.

This tip written by Abel Solutions Senior SharePoint Consultant and Solution Accelerator Manager Anthony Magee.