Industry
Service
Project: Design a bespoke digital platform to transform a residential flipping business
To be successful in real estate, particularly in the domain of residential flipping, a company must excel across a variety of business aspects. These range from market knowledge to risk management, legal and financial compliance, transaction and data security, and adapting to shifting marketing conditions.
Integrating all these aspects is not an easy task, especially when you factor in the speed of closing deals as another condition for success. This is where technology—and experienced tech partners like HTEC—enter the picture.
Our client, a renowned real estate company that operates and finances the single-home marketplace, turned to HTEC to transform and digitize their business.
Challenge: Centralize data and accelerate property evaluation and risk management
The client works with individual investors and companies, providing them with low-rate funding, helping them manage renovation projects by following defined specifications, and securing the buyout price, which includes cooperation with real estate investment trusts (REITs). These trust funds need to make sure that their real estate suppliers provide them with high-quality, risk-free properties. Two crucial factors for the client’s success are thorough property evaluation (from pre-screening to calculating post-renovation value) and well-kept, centralized documentation, where data security and availability are paramount.
Although the client had excellent domain knowledge and product-market fit, there was a notable lack in terms of adequate technology and software architecture expertise. This was partially due to a previous underwhelming digital transformation effort that left the client with technical debt. Many workarounds were introduced to compensate for this lack of adequate technology, which resulted in data being scattered in various files and databases. This negatively impacted productivity, impaired legal and financial compliance, and slowed down realizing SLAs with stakeholders and investors. In addition, there was no centralized platform that would streamline, consolidate, and automate property evaluation processes.
Solution: Robust property evaluation digital platform
HTEC and the client joined efforts focused on automating manual processes to drive improved performance and scalability. HTEC designed a platform to streamline labor-intensive tasks, enhance overall efficiency, and ultimately facilitate the expansion of the business.
The platform solution was engineered to automate and streamline several tasks, improving efficiency and reducing operational overhead. The relevant steps in the evaluation process include the following:
- Property pre-screening – analyzing risk factors
- Home facts verification – inspecting public and third-party records
- After Renovation Value (ARV) – dynamic comparable valuation
- Rental value calculation
- Risk score determination
- Final value
Success: Automated processes that increase efficiency and reduce overhead
To manually carry out tasks related to the assessment of property value and associating risks, a pricing analyst requires a significant amount of time, switching between different data sources, which negatively impacts productivity and incurs additional overhead. The automated platform from HTEC eliminates that overhead, optimizes resources, and saves time for other critical tasks, paving the way for future growth.
In addition, the benefits of introducing streamlined document management include resolving potential legal and financial compliance issues, increasing productivity by centralizing data and making it more accessible, and improving security by enabling role-based access to crucial data. Moreover, enhancements such as templates and e-signing were devised to reduce manual work and maximize time efficiency.
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