A study was conducted to see what the main challenges were for property management and the top results were:
- Hiring and Maintaining Staff and Vendors
- Growing Revenue and/or Lowering Operating Costs
- Property Damage and Unexpected Maintenance Issues
- Time Management
Does this sound familiar? While these challenges may always be present, what you may underestimate is the power of IT consulting from Evans Consulting Services which can help relieve the stress in these areas. Let’s see how.
Hiring and Maintaining Staff and Vendors
Problem: Property managers have to find, evaluate, and manage many vendors to keep their properties running smoothly, including IT vendors. It’s important to have quality people working to maintain your building’s IT otherwise the building systems do not operate at maximum efficiency. Expending hours to locate IT vendors to provide services you need, vetting their credibility, and price checking, may be wasting your valuable time that could be better used to focus on other projects.
Solution: Evans Consulting Services provides consulting services to help manage your IT needs. We identify your end result, and seek out the best solution provider for you. We vet their experience, their staff, and their work product.
Case Study: ECS recently worked with a large property management firm to evaluate all their properties’ Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) lines. With the FCC’s order 19-72A1, discounts on POTS lines will cause costs to maintain these to increase. ECS began by engaging a vendor to assess each of the firm’s properties to tone and tag each POTS line in place. By determining the number of utility and service lines required, a remediation plan was put into place, identifying the lines to be disconnected (saving money), and which can be converted to Cat6 lines (reducing future costs).
Growing Revenue and/or Lowering Operating Costs
Problem #1: A big component of your job is to increase your revenue and try to deduct any unnecessary expenses. Property Managers do this through increased leasing and reduction of unnecessary or emergency staffing needs.
For example, an after-hour heating or ventilation emergency typically requires a vendor technician to visit the building usually at the cost of a minimum of 4 hours, at time and a half, which can be very expensive. However, if your building engineer could utilize a remote system from their home, they may be able to resolve the issue within minutes, reducing the staffing hours needed for such an event.
Solution: ECS, in conjunction with your HVAC contractor, can spec the correct system requirements and equipment that provides secure remote access to your building systems, thereby reducing future after-hours staffing needs.
Problem #2: Maintaining a building’s operations can be costly. You’re constantly battling fixed and unexpected costs making it difficult to lower expenses. Hard decisions may have to be made to decrease costs but sometimes looking at internal processes and materials can save you the money you didn’t know you were spending.
Solution: ECS can work with property managers or tenants to propose upgrades to their existing building amenities using the latest technology, thereby creating new revenue growth opportunities. We help to lower your operating costs in the future by disconnecting unused components, converting data lines to Cat6, and assessing where your building systems could improve to help your performance. An investment now in IT improvements and upgrades will help decrease your costs down the road.
Property Damage and Unexpected Maintenance Issues
Problem: Your building’s equipment and hardware can fail or you need infrastructure upgrades to improve tenant retention and added services. Additionally, extreme weather can disable your buildings connectivity, or cause a blackout. It’s not a matter of if this will happen but when it will happen, and when that time comes it’s better to be prepared ahead of time.
Solution: ECS will install security cameras, cable new tenant suites, order computer systems that can assist the Property Engineer in remote accessing building systems, and multiple other IT aspects that help the infrastructure of your building. These IT upgrades and additions help build a sense of reliability between the tenants and the Property Manager, increase security of your site, and increase productivity. ECS plans ahead for disaster remediation by working with property management firms to assess potential risks and find solutions to mitigate these. ECS finds the solution for the IT problems, and we work with you to get your property running with max efficiency and effectiveness.
Case Study: A major telecommunications company was contracted by one of ECS’s customers to do preliminary work on the telecommunications network of their complex. An error was made by that company’s service technician, causing telecommunications to be interrupted, resulting in the loss of connectivity, in-building services, and alarm systems. ECS discovered the error, diagnosed the solution, and worked with the vendor to correct it. Temporary measures were set up to allow for connectivity while the repairs were made.
Time Management
Problem: You are a busy person handling multiple facets of the property between the upkeep of your building, bills, tenants, complaints, and the list could go on. You may not fully understand all the details of your IT system needs. Handing these systems off to a partner you can trust would leave you valuable time for all your other projects.
Solution: Leveraging ECS saves you the time of identifying IT problems and solutions, or finding the vendors you need. We provide you with our expert opinion and analysis of your system’s needs to prevent problems and improve performance. Our recommendations to your organization provide strategies to troubleshoot and we find individuals based on their expertise to service your building.
Contact our IT consultants at Evans Consulting Services to begin the process of saving you time and money while addressing your IT needs for your property-managed sites.