API, Integrations & Automations as fundamentals for business success.
You, the real estate professionals and organisations need to find your competitive edge in the modern age! Fortunately, there’s technology to help. We want to increase your capacity for introducing new solutions to create efficient and more natural ways to operate with data-intensive processes.
Being slow to identify subtle trends means leaving money on the table. However, being one of the first to adopt a compelling opportunity, might change into a significant advantage.
Waiting for the real estate industry to move into tech has been like watching a boiling pot. The industry hasn’t been on the ball to adopt big data as a key to success and implement digital solutions to improve efficiency. Now, that things are moving forward in terms of Digitalisation, one issue stands out. The biggest challenge so far has been poor, or even non-existing integration capabilities of the old IT systems in the industry. In this blog, you will find out why technical solutions for the real estate industry are only helpful if they can be efficiently integrated into existing systems.
A successful data-driven approach can yield powerful insights
We at Assetti, are helping real estate investment professionals to overcome these issues. As for our value proposition, we see an open ecosystem and integration capabilities as key attributes and benefits to our customers. We call this digital-first real estate.
1. Select a solution with open API – Open APIs as an enabler to the future
We see a lot of cases where several «isolated solutions» are operating side by side. But this is less than ideal; the ideal way looks very different. To support your business, make sure that solutions are easy to integrate and enables collaboration between the different parties.
Having a solution in place where you can be in charge of the data, gives organizations the flexibility to fit their needs and resources correctly. For example, open APIs enable real estate organisations to work together with their in-house team or selected service providers. Open APIs also provide organisations with the possibility to work alongside the solutions they have already acquired for the business. For example, there is supported dashboarding with BI tools like Qlik, Tableau or Power BI, as well as automating invoicing processes with accounting and financial systems. Also, providing anything from the marketing of vacancies to signing lease agreements electronically are valuable uses for the API.
Are you looking for ways to support asset managers and give them the best overview of the situation? Do you want to provide real-time reporting or communicate other business-critical operations to investors? This is where open APIs provide the best tools to develop the needed data flows and to create all the necessary information – while making the data easy, accessible, and up-to-date.
Leveraging APIs in your application can lead to more flexible software. Open APIs reduce the supplier risk as those can be changed at any time. Neither the data or the process is limited to the same supplier. Additionally, when organisations select to utilise applications and software that have open APIs, they will reduce their IT costs.
What is an API?
An API is a set of programming code that enables data transmission between one software product and another. It also contains the terms of this data exchange.
2. Productized, service-based integrations
Integration is a principal concern when it comes to commercial real estate. Business processes involve large numbers of people, and teams, and organizations that need to work together to make everything happen. Technology has become, in some sense, consumable, but the processes to acquire new technologies and solutions are still missing a clear acquisition strategy.
Let’s look at the example of organizations that are moving towards SaaS applications which scale with the business. In these cases, it is unlikely that the full potential of the ecosystem’s logic is taken into consideration or even utilised. Investments into new systems are often done with an “on-demand basis”, meaning that the evaluation of integrability is typically done just against the APIs.
Did you know that many of the modern SaaS vendors provide a market place, service-based integrations or productized integrations? These turnkey solutions provide a fast way to explore new opportunities and provide endless alternatives for real estate organisations. These best-in-class integrations will give organisations well-specified use cases, as well as process structures helping to take advantage of the best data flows.
However, matching the process with a new solution is often just adding another solution for the IT department to manage. When the ecosystem has been analysed and other possibilities are identified, organisations can truly digitalise their operations. One example of how ecosystems will start working, you can find from our blog: Finland: The real estate ecosystem revolution has begun.
3. Grandfather the file transfer away
As the real estate industry has existed for decades, before the time of computers and long before SaaS software with modern APIs, it takes time and effort to make the change from old to modern. Considering that technological development is faster than ever, it challenges the industry even more. Now, it is not enough to simply take the step towards digitalisation but to familiarize yourself and your company with continuous change.
In the early digital age, nobody was expecting the speed of technological innovation. The leading mindset of technology companies was to develop “the best master software” that is “everything that you need and expect”. That resulted in a bunch of early applications that ended up with good tools but software with few options to communicate with other software. Nowadays, the leading opinion is to select your battles and master them perfectly. When a user is able to select the best tools for each operation and connect them easily with integrations, everyone wins.
Where old technology meets newer technology
Older technologies and newer technologies need each other in order to serve the needs of working life and industries. Even though the software from different decades might not find a common language on their own, there is no issue that a developer could not solve. The solution is file-based transfers, a bridge between generations.
Most of the software providers nowadays share the common goal of building up ecosystems. Those who serve all of the people involved. The technologies to connect different technologies are improving as everyone takes care of their own software and its compatibility. In the future, the file-based transfers will be the strange opinion in the software markets – whereas APIs provide better options on easiness, safety, speed and flexibility.
Back to the future
The world is changing, and change has gotten quicker than ever before, due to internal and external pressures. Digital evolution has happened in a concise timeframe, and with the pressure of remote working, it just got even faster. Now, real estate has a great opportunity to do the leap to the future and digitise the processes so they will create a future competitive advantage. It is time for growth hacking in the real estate industry.
The future is all about digital-first real estate, where integrations are enablers of the next generation of business development. In many industries, this has been a reality for a long time. This has been a major influence in highlighting the role of data and information that is refined from it. Therefore it has been a foundation for building a competitive advantage.
When organisations are preparing for the challenges of the future and solving issues of today, continuous development and improving efficiency are major building blocks. We encourage real estate organisations to consider integrability and connectivity when selecting new solutions for improving the organisation’s efficiency in teamwork and other processes.
Assetti connects you – we’ve got you covered!
Assetti´s main objective is to support our customers in their developing operations by having the optimized tools in use for process management, reporting, and team collaboration. Assetti offers a platform for building digitized real estate operations. It is our pleasure to help but also to secure the efficient teamwork, up-to-date data, and best tools for each process. It is the ensemble that counts!
To support digitalisation, Assetti offers a wide variety of integration options
- Assetti API – Full RESTful API for process automation and efficient data management
- Productized integrations to market-leading financial software and real estate systems
- Assetti SFTP – Integration service for file-based transfer to support old systems
- SSO – SAML 2.0 based single sign-on integration
