Simplify property management & sales with smart automation

Double reservations happen in almost every developer and agency that grows past one sales person. The availability list lives in a spreadsheet, gets emailed on Monday, and by Wednesday three people are working from three versions of it.

The embarrassment is the small part of the cost. The real damage is a buyer who was told an apartment was theirs and then told otherwise, in a market where reputation moves faster than advertising.

Holding units as records rather than rows in a file also settles the internal questions. Which floors are moving, which line of apartments is not selling, how long a unit stays reserved before it converts or lapses.

Long payment plans are normal here and they are the hardest part of a developer's accounts. A hundred units on staggered schedules produce thousands of due dates, and the moment that lives in one person's spreadsheet the business has a single point of failure.

Money received before handover is not revenue, it is an obligation you owe until the unit is delivered. Keeping those amounts against the unit rather than in a general customer balance keeps the picture honest and makes the handover a straightforward posting instead of an investigation.

The caveat is that the recognition policy stays with your accountant. The system records what was agreed, what was received and when. Deciding how and when that becomes revenue in your statements is a professional judgement, and it should be, because it varies with the contract.

Developers usually know their total cost. Fewer can say what one project cost without a week of work, and that is the number that decides whether the next site is worth buying.

The costs that get lost are the ones that arrive late. Interest on the construction facility, the extra work agreed with the contractor after the concrete was poured, and the marketing spent on a launch that ran two months longer than planned.

Once a full picture exists for one completed project, the next appraisal stops being an estimate built from memory. You are pricing against something that happened.

Real estate sales are slow and personal, which is exactly why they leak. A buyer enquires in March, is not ready, and nobody speaks to them again. Twelve months later they buy from someone who did call.

Keeping the pipeline in one place also answers the marketing question honestly. Portals, brokers, signage and referrals all produce enquiries, and only one of those numbers usually justifies its cost. Without the source recorded on the deal, everyone defends their own channel with anecdotes.

The other half is agent activity. Viewings arranged, offers made, deals closed. That data settles most arguments about performance and it is a by-product of using the system rather than a report anyone has to write.

Commission disputes are almost always about timing or about attribution. The agent believes the deal closed in one month, finance sees the money arriving in another, and an external broker claims a client who had already enquired directly.

The record decides both. The enquiry has a date and a source, the sale has a date, and the receipts have dates. What is left to argue about is the policy, which is a management decision rather than a data problem.

It is worth saying that no system removes the negotiation. Split commissions, house accounts and exceptions for a large buyer will still be settled by people. The system keeps the facts steady while they do it.

That boundary is worth being clear about, because plenty of software in this sector promises both and does neither well. A portal is a shop window. An ERP is the back office behind it, and the two jobs need different tools.

Where the difference shows is at month end. Sales, collections, project costs and the ledger built from the same records means the management report exists without anybody assembling it from three sources that disagree.

Wizard Cloud ERP runs fourteen modules on one database, so a developer can start with the unit register, the payment plans and accounting, then bring in project costing on the next building rather than mid-way through the current one.