Have you ever wondered why real estate is ignoring omnipresent technology innovations in favor of hard copies, manual checks, and offline communication? Why it is still taking months, if not years, to get a home mortgage? And why real estate agents keep forgetting your personal details after you’ve reiterated this a hundred times? These questions must be creeping into the mind of every person who’s ever bought, rented, or sold a house.
You don’t need to dig deep for the answer, though: Real estate, like no other industry, has been satisfied with the status quo for decades, basically sitting on the sidelines and indifferently watching how its brick-and-mortar counterparts, finance and insurance, were gradually embracing technology.
However, with 66% of customers now expecting personalized offerings and others valuing convenience over price, the do-it-yourself approach is hardly enough. Real estate needs to reach out for help to innovators.
AscendixTech is a technology enablement firm from Dallas, Texas, helping inherently undertechnologized industries embrace innovation. It was founded by two friends, Wes Snow and Todd Terry, in 1996, when automation was just sprouting, and real estate technologies hardly existed at all.
Nevertheless, armed with the vision of a better future without opaque systems and disarranged workflows, AscendixTech creators gradually started cooperating with Microsoft and Salesforce, and soon the company’s technology consulting practice morphed into its first product – AscendixRE CRM – a customer relationship management system designed to simplify real estate agents’ workflows and ease data management hassle.
For almost 16+ years now, AscendixTech has been keeping a laser-like focus on real estate, addressing the needs of the industry’s main stakeholders – agents, investors, landlords, property managers, and tenants – and is doing so through its 2 divisions:
- CRM consulting, cloud migration, and custom software development services.
- Ready to use software products tailor-made for real estate.
Redefining Real Estate Through Technology Consulting & Development Services
The main actors behind the scenes of buying / selling / marketing of a property in real estate are agents. All generations of buyers and renters turned to them for professional help with searching for the right home, negotiating terms of sale/rent, and securing payments. Sellers, as well, reach out to professionals to help market their home to potential buyers, sell fast, and price their home competitively.
Multiply this pool of responsibilities by the number of properties and buyers / tenants / landlords, generally referred to as contacts, and you might find it incredibly easy to drown in the endless sea of data.
The situation is no different in other subsectors of real estate, like lending and property management, where lenders and property operators deal with multiple tasks and personas at a time.
What AscendixTech does in this regard is that it equips main real estate stakeholders with technology intelligence:
- advising them on the most actionable ways to arrange, groom, and architect data
- simplifying organizational workflows with top-notch CRM technology
- refactoring their legacy systems
- developing brand new software for internal use and oriented at the end-user
- and integrating existing systems and tools allowing them to “communicate” and synchronize with each other.
A notable example of how powerful the wise application of technology in real estate may be is the success story of Colliers International – a leading global real estate services and investment management company. Colliers was looking to make a better use of their data (you can imagine how many records a global leader with 18,000 workers and thrice as many clients should have) and present it in a format that their professionals and clients would find attractive and easy to navigate.
AscendixTech has met these needs with state-of-the-art document management and generation software custom-made for Colliers and fully integrated with the existing organizational software ecosystem, so the data could be automatically pulled from their core CRM system and transformed into digestible brochures and reports.
Simplifying Real Estate Workflows with Industry-Tailored Software
Having lived through the pains of real estate when partnering with and supporting the needs of the biggest industry players like Colliers, Ascendix has soon come to a clear understanding that some of those challenges are found in every second real estate firm and thus could be addressed with a predefined set of solutions.
That is how Ascendix embarked on the product authoring journey, which culminated in the buildout of 17+ products, each designed to meet specific needs of various real estate subdivisions.
To name a few, Ascendix has tailored:
- an all-in-one Customer Relationship Management system for neat data organization and workflow optimization (AscendixRE CRM)
- an advanced search tool for Salesforce users (Ascendix Search)
- a user-friendly document generation tool for crafting visually pleasing real estate brochures and flyers with a few clicks (Composer)
- An easy-to-use listing management solution for hassle-free listing marketing across the web (MarketSpace)
These products have won the hearts of multinational real estate companies around the world, like JLL, Colliers International, and Hanna CRE.
What It Really Means to Be a Service and Product Development Company in Real Estate
There are a lot of companies that are either service providers or product developers, but there are very few that have the knowledge and experience in both.
Having walked down its own product development lane, Ascendix shares its real estate and technology wisdom with up-and-coming startups having an idea of how to change the industry for the better but lacking real estate experience or technology intelligence to develop a full-featured product. This becomes possible through AscendixTech top-notch software audit, managed delivery, and augmentation services.
How does being a product author and service provider accelerate real estate innovation, you may ask? There are at least 2 ultimate gains for the industry:
- As AscendixTech cofounder, Wes Snow, defines, ‘we’re not just technology experts, we speak real estate’, meaning that real estate agencies who embark on the digitalization journey with AscendixTech rest assured that their processes and sensitive data sets are in safe hands.
- Being both a product developer and service provider, AscendixTech is savvy about every step in the product development journey and thus can help other innovators create quality products that will fuel industry-wide innovation.
The question is, are real estate professionals ready to abandon the old way of doing things and embrace these transformations? I think it is high time they started doing it now, either with the help of industry innovators or by themselves, otherwise they risk being left behind and never being able to catch up with other more tech-savvy industries.