Customer spotlight this month is on Pioneer Property Managment a.k.a Rent-Me-Denver.
The Problem
The lease renewal process at PPM was a chaotic process creating a high risk of missing renewals. This chaos and risk affect the property managers making their job stressful and cumbersome. Property owners could be financially affected if the renewal was overlooked or not handled correctly leaving the property empty. Tenants were also affected. Without consistent, concise and clear communication tenants could not make timely decisions stalling the renewal process.
The process was managed using spreadsheets. Property managers were continually updating spreadsheets with the latest communication from tenants and owners using email as the primary communication channel. You can imagine what this process was like with hundreds of property renewals in progress.
The Solution
Since the primary channel for communication is email the decision was made to build tooling around email communications. Sticking with a communication method property managers were already familiar and comfortable with made lots of sense. The solution tracks email communication and gathers analytics around the state of an email thread with a tenant. This allows the property manager to understand where the state of the renewal lies. Also, much of the communication load is removed from the property manager using canned responses.
Leaving flexibility in the process is crucial. Tenants often have questions that can not be answered by canned messages. A human touch can often move the process along much quicker for tenants who have more difficult circumstances. This flexibility is built into the system allowing the property manager to choose the response, or write a custom response based on the managed conversation thread.
All put together this allows property managers to always understand the state of a renewal with a glance. Removing much of the burden of tracking the communication and initiating renewals manually.
Reducing the chaos and in turn reducing the risk allows PPM and their property managers to more easily and with more confidence manage the renewal process.
The Tech
SendGrid’s API is leveraged to parse and push the email messages to the Lease Renewal app. Leveraging Sendgrid webhooks to push data to the Lease Renewal app allows for tracking the state of the email thread. Other data about the email can be tracked, wheater an email was opened or not. Allowing property managers even deeper understanding of the tenant.
Activti BPM acts as a state machine tracking the state of the communication process and keeping the workflow moving forward. Activity has a powerful XML based DSL allowing for complex decoupled workflow to built easily. Alongside workflow modeling tools makes for fast workflow modeling.
Java Spring server side app wraps up the Activti Engine and the integration with the Send Grid api’s. Connecting data about the lease renewal and the email messages is done using the power of Java Spring as well with the same app. These could easily be decoupled and deployed seperatly for a more service driven approach. A Restful hypermedia API based on HAL is exposed allowing for a flexible UI to be designed and built.
React.js is a UI technology designed by Facebook developers. Creating an easy to use interface that matched the needs of Property Managers was important. Reacts componentized model is used in the lease renewal app to do just that. React allows for modular UI components that can be easily reused. Leveraging React allowed for a very functional UI to be built quickly. Relying on the consistency of the RESTful (HAL) API to create a consistent experience that can be replicated across domains.
To get a better understanding of what we can do for you. Please schedule a time to talk using the link below or visit us a Symthia.com.
