At a Glance

From late rent collection to poor maintenance tracking, various operational challenges can negatively impact UK property management businesses. ERPs like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central streamline these processes through automation and unified dashboards that offer real-time insights. Work with reliable partners like Brookland Solutions to optimise your operations, improve financial visibility, and ensure regulatory compliance.

How Property Management Problems Are Costing Your Business

The UK’s property sector is facing significant economic pressure, along with the ever-increasing competition from real estate agencies moving into property management. Firms are already struggling to differentiate themselves while grappling with economic pressures of rising property taxes, insurance premiums, and labour costs. On top of that, they’re also dealing with hurdles that are silently affecting their everyday operations.

Not addressing the operational problems associated with property management can cause your company to face hidden financial and operational issues, including delayed decisions, missed revenue opportunities, compliance risks, and wasted employee hours.

Whether you manage large office complexes or a handful of residential developments, you need to tackle the operational challenges in property management first.

This guide explores the five common operational challenges in property management that your company may be facing and how to overcome them with ERP systems.

The Most Common Operational Challenges in Property Management

1. Inefficient Rent Collection Process

Collecting rent on time is critical to maintaining the overall financial health of your company. Chasing late payments is time-consuming and can quickly stress out your teams. Plus, with growing fraud risks, you may want to consider a system that doesn’t disrupt your cash flow and tenant relations.

Possible Solution:

Use an ERP that supports property management to:

  • Automate rent reminders and invoices
  • Check payment status to flag any missed payments and start follow-ups immediately
  • Allow flexibility of choice in payment options

2. Maintenance and Repair Co-ordination

Keeping up with repair requests and coordinating maintenance schedules is another time-consuming operational roadblock that your property management company may face. It can be difficult for your teams to track contractor schedules when multiple maintenance requests are coming in at the same time.

Possible Solution:

Integrate a system that streamlines your operations by:

  • Logging maintenance requests 
  • Assigning tasks to field engineers
  • Scheduling both reactive and preventative maintenance activities
  • Grouping multiple ongoing jobs
  • Providing access to the cost and income information of all projects

Many property management companies use Business Central as a fully integrated maintenance and scheduling system to ease their property maintenance tasks.

3. No Central Operational Dashboard

Property management companies of all sizes rely on separate tools for maintenance, communication, accounting, and reporting. Using disjointed tools often results in your internal teams being unable to coordinate on the same page and brings about operational challenges, including slow decision-making and work duplication.

Possible Solution:

Bring in an ERP to unify all your operations on a single, real-time updated dashboard. This supports:

  • Gathering all data in one place, under a single view
  • Ensuring your teams are updated and on the same page
  • Automating repetitive administrative tasks, including invoice generation, arrears tracking, and tenant notifications
  • Self-service tools for viewing balances, requesting maintenance, or updating details

4. Financial Complexity and Reporting

For property managers, handling property finances is all about service charge calculations, ground rent invoicing, end-of-year accounts, handling client money, and many more key tasks, all while staying compliant with property finance regulations.

While managing these tasks is important, it’s equally important for your teams to gain financial insights into your property portfolio. 

Possible Solution:

Instead of only relying on an accounting system, use an ERP system tailored to meet your property management needs to:

  • Track your income, operating costs, service charges, and profit margins at the unit, building, or portfolio level
  • Manage accounts, reconcile bank statements, and generate financial reports
  • Automate budgeting and forecasting to stay ahead of costs and plan expenditures
  • Give you clarity on occupancy rates, arrears trends, and service ticket resolution times
  • Help your teams stay audit-ready

5. Compliance with Property-Related Regulations

The UK property management sector is complex, with rules and regulations constantly changing. Property managers need to be in the know with evolving legislation such as fire safety laws, leasehold reform, GDPR, and service charges. 

Possible Solution:

Integrate an ERP adapted to your workflows in addition to staying updated with the relevant industry news in the UK property management industry.

A good property management ERP should:

  • Support built-in compliance tools and checks
  • Keep well-accounted records of all lease changes, maintenance logs, and safety certificates to prevent expiry lapses
  • Support compliance reporting and audits

How Business Central ERP Can Fix Operational Problems Associated with Property Management

Business Central is an ERP system developed by Microsoft that can be configured to suit any business, including property management businesses in the UK.

Here’s how BC’s various standard features and developed add-ons can be used to fix your operational challenges:

Along with standard Business Central functionalities, our Empowered with Business Central for Professional Services gives your teams more control over your projects and tasks. To customise this for your property business’ needs, connect with us.

Choosing an ERP Partner to Address Operational Challenges in Property Management

If you’re keen to take a more systematic approach towards managing your property management operations, you’ll need to choose a reliable partner in addition to a robust ERP system like D365 Business Central.

A reliable ERP implementation and support partner for property management companies offers:

  • Rich, in-depth knowledge of the UK property management industry
  • Experience working with property management companies
  • Implementation and support tailored to what your property management business needs
  • A clear understanding and structured ERP solution to your operational challenges
  • Ongoing training and support even after ERP implementation

With Business Central as your ERP of choice, you can count on Brookland Solutions to help you address and minimise many of the problems associated with property management operations.

Ready to transform the way you operate your property management business? Book a consultation with our team today.