On this episode of Whiteboard Wednesday, Lance Giles takes us through MRI Software’s Condo Sales product, formerly eCondoSystems. Condo Sales is designed to help manage the development and sale of condo units, providing complete visibility into the status of portfolio projects and operations.
Video Transcription
Lance Giles: Hi. I’m Lance Giles and this is Whiteboard Wednesday. Today, we’re going to be talking about Condo Sales, one of the newly acquired products at MRI, acquired probably about six months ago. It’s chiefly designed around the sale and distribution of condominiums that are coming up in development. If a developer hasn’t developed it yet and they’re looking out to sell these units, then they’ll have to have a piece of software to monitor all of their contracts, their marketing, their accounting, their visitors, their registration, the CRM process, and their brokers and agents.
It’s an all encompassing product, and it does quite a bit. What I’m going to show you today is how it works. It’s chiefly designed around the marketing, accounting and CRM process, which is client relationship management, where brokers and agents would go out and find visitors. They would keep up with them, set themselves reminders, recontact them all while keeping it into the system and making sure that they’re keeping up with it.
Then from there, those brokers will write contracts on any units that the visitors are interested in. The contract drawing process is very all inclusive in Condo Sales. It includes add-ons and upgrades. It can include commission structures. It can include deposit structures that are automated so that the contract drawing process is as smooth as possible.
When all is said and done, when the contract is fully written, it is then rendered into a PDF from the data inside the database so that clients can sign them right away. We even implemented a docu-sign process so that they don’t even have to print it out anymore. They can just shoot it off the client. The right people are signing it, the right buyers. It comes right back to the system and everybody is happy.
From there, once the contracts are written, it goes to the closing process. That’s where a contract administrator would come in, and they would basically go through the contract, make sure everything is dotted and signed appropriately. There may be some concessions that are involved, some closing charge credits, contract credits, debt collector credits.
All of these things are done in the closing process. Those administrators would make sure all the paperwork is done and all the commissions are paid at the right time. After that, they can go through and look at their accounting and commission structure and print reports. There’s a bunch of reports on Condo Sales that you can access. We’re using SQL Server Reporting Studio where you can render it in PDF or Excel.
Everyone has access to the same information. All these things are done inside of the Condo Sales product. Really, what we’re looking at here two principle people: developers, the people that are actually making the condominiums. These things may not be built yet. They’re actually selling units that haven’t been built yet. That’s why they have to get a certain number of interested parties before they can actually get money from the banks.
These are the guys that are interested and seeing and using the product from the standpoint of marketing and the CRM process and registration. The next kind of people that are interested are brokers and the associated agents of course. These guys interact with each other all the time. The developer is going to the broker and saying, “You need to sell our condominiums.”
The broker is going to the developer and saying, “Well, here is how many we have interested parties are going. They may change our commission structure based on that.” These guys want to cut at the sale, but these guys want to get their units sold. That’s kind of the relationship between the developers and the agents, and that’s why both parties are using this system in different ways.
One is looking at from a standpoint of how many units are actually going out? What is my overall portfolio looking like? How many units haven’t been sold yet? They have a life cycle too. So, when you start to break ground on these condos, you have to make sure that there is enough units that are being sold. They can run reports and do aggregations to say, “Well, how many units haven’t been sold yet?
We’re in danger of not getting our next deposit structure.” That’s when they can use Condo systems to really branch out and say, “What else can we do with this? Can we lower the prices? Do we need to higher the prices because they’re selling too quickly?” The agents also can use Condo Sales by looking at their commissions. They can see what commissions are coming up due, how many they’ve already been paid, what their potential payment is.
They’re encouraged to use the system and the CRM process, that is emailing the clients and having the emails come back through the system, so a record of it, so that their managers, the sales managers can say, “Who’s doing the most sales, who is doing the least sales and who needs to follow up with the clients.”
