Whether you’re choosing a treasury management system, optimizing accounts receivable, or integrating your enterprise resource planning and banking systems, choosing the right technology provider can make or break success. 

Learn more about how to choose the right technology provider for your commercial real estate organization. 

Determine your goals and how to achieve them

Before deciding on a technology provider, you need to clearly define the problem and goals and determine how to measure success.

• Understand your client: Every great product organization starts with its customer and works backward. Real estate is no different. First, define your customer. Are they an internal team, a resident of your property, or a retail occupant? Then, you can dive deep into their experiences. Use qualitative methods, such as interviews and focus groups, and quantitative ones, such as surveys and user testing, to learn about your client’s needs, preferences and pain points. 
• Define the objective: With a firm grasp on the client’s needs, you can properly define your objective. What problem are you trying to solve with commercial real estate technology? For instance, you may want to gain reporting insights, increase operational efficiencies or improve communication across your real estate organization.  
• Maintain your North Star: Defining your objective can help you establish your company’s guiding value to ensure you’re aligned to the right technology partner. As you develop, build and implement technology solutions, unforeseen issues are likely to occur, but your North Star, your objective, shouldn’t change.
• Develop metrics: It’s important to define key metrics upfront to properly evaluate the technology solution’s effectiveness. Establish clear benchmarks and key performance indicators  to measure whether the product is delivering against client needs. If your objective is to establish a loyalty program for residents across your properties, for example, you should look at engagement behaviors, retention rate, lifetime value, turnover and referral rates. 
• Regularly evaluate your progress: Assess metrics throughout the implementation process to ensure the solution is achieving the desired outcomes. In the case of the loyalty program, for example, your analysis may show guests are abandoning the program during onboarding. Your objective is to still create the best loyalty program, but a key metric could be that 95% of guests that begin the onboarding process complete it. Create metrics that measure the success of each step of the experience, not only the end result. This will produce a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the client and solution. 

Balance innovation and reliability

The best technology providers deliver both innovation and reliability.

Innovation creates opportunities for growth and can give your business a competitive edge. The best providers invest in research and development to stay at the forefront of technology. When your vendor is dedicated to technology advancements, you’re less likely to outgrow the provider’s solution, and you can continue to innovate and grow without undergoing costly overhauls.

Reliability is equally important for commercial real estate—particularly multifamily—because revenue is concentrated in rent payments.

JPMorganChase for example, aims to offer the safety, scale and resiliency of a global bank with the agility and innovation of a fintech. The firm spends $17 billion on technology annually—an investment backed by our fortress balance sheet and secure payment rails—to operate with speed and precision at scale.

Tackle technology challenges across your business

While adding new technology can be a complicated, involved process, some hurdles to adoption may come from within your organization, including: 

Technical challenges

Many real estate firms operate on outdated legacy systems, often referred to as technical debt. These companies must decide whether to upgrade their systems onto a platform and add more solutions or implement individual, full-stack solutions that solve specific client needs. This decision depends on many factors, including the existing infrastructure’s flexibility and a cost-benefit analysis of upgrading versus adding individual solutions. 

Once your real estate company addresses its current tech debt, it can enable investment in future innovation and capabilities. Creating a roadmap to understand what technology you need now and what your systems may need to support in the future can help.

Cultural challenges

Cultural challenges with internal users and stakeholders can be harder to identify and quantify. Whether it’s because they’re concerned about job security or uncomfortable with new technology, employees may be resistant to change. When choosing a technology vendor, look for a team that’s understanding and empathetic and has a thorough employee training plan. For any tech solution to be successful, you need to address your employees’ concerns early on to gain their support, and regularly reach out for feedback. 

Implement and scale your tech solution

When implementing your tech-enabled product, start small. After completing a pilot project, you can iterate and refine the technology before rolling it out across the organization. 

Remember: Technology implementations are rarely perfect from the outset. Continuous feedback and iteration from internal teams and external users will help ensure the solution is effectively scaling. Be prepared to refine and adjust the solution based on performance data.