Okay people, it is not Greyhound this time, but the bankrupted Amtrak and the very dysfunctional DMV in Las Vegas, Nevada (you had to be there). Our industry has been passed up again! I just heard from a fellow Buzz connection, that Amtrak is now offering free wifi on its trains. While at the same time, I have also learned that the State of Nevada-Las Vegas DMV is following the post office’s APM machine, since 2005 and has kiosk automation that collects money and processes basic services! Although the comments on some of the blogs about Amtrak today, were quite entertaining, the subject reminded me of our recent post, “If a bus, a hamburger and plane can do it, why can’t we?”

Nevada DMV Kiosk, circa 2005.

You may recall that McDonalds offers free wifi at all of its restaurants. I am not talking about slow, bogged down lame wifi here folks. I am talking about super fast and awesome wifi. The workers are clueless that it exists, most of the time, but boy is it fast. I love it. Surf the web and drink coffee and eat yogurt. Yummy.

So when I saw the Buzz this morning that Amtrak now has wifi, I just shook my head. Here we are, property and facility managers with captive audiences all over our properties, owners who want full buildings and no FREE or public wifi or even the thought of automating anything at all! I think it is absolutely unbelievable. How did this happen? How did the world just pass us by? Why and how can the most dysfunctional and blatantly known, perpetually bankrupt Amtrak and the classic DMV offer something as simple as wifi and a kiosk/machine, similar to an ATM, inside a building or facility that we completely manage, repair, clean or worse yet, own. Yet, we still do not have wifi or even the thought of the dream machine like -an APPM (Automated Property Management Machine) for our industry?

I look back over the 30 some years in this industry and shake my head every single day. I talk to property managers, facility managers, service businesses too, that tell me they have no website, no domain name, no awareness of what is happening all around them. What is Twitter is not even remotely in the cards. Now even Facebook has passed all of us up. Yes, Facebook. The app that your great grandmother uses! The buildings are in a time warp or something and the managers got swooped up too! We are all just stumbling and mumbling while this goes on.

Facebook at 500 million users!!

Everything is a swipe, a click, a snap or whatever, but we still have 3 part Peachtree NCR forms on our desk and are filling out paper lease forms and logs on clipboards. It is so funny, but it is not really. It is rather pathetic and mindblowing. There must be something scary to us or we have a fear of technology. I am not exactly sure which. The IT departments at our companies might as well be frozen in giant ice cubes since 2000 (yes, 2000!!) when they started to think that a property or facility manager might be able to use a single computer in an office of 5 people. Oh and they gave us 1 single email address called abccompany1@abccompnay.com. They did stop technology once they rolled out the LANS, only at the corporate office. Each of our desktop machines were not even connected due to the cost of a modem phone line in 2000. I guess that was good enough for us and all we could handle.

Now grant it, there are many that have embraced it, exploited and used it up like it was air, but those are the few and far between. All of those people are at Realcomm right now in Las Vegas, Nevada. They are having a blast and they are mingling and talking to Jim Young about where we are today. (According to Jim that is probably 5% of us are using webbased systems) and Jim is just so worked up right now with all of the enthusiasm you cannot imagine the frenzy and energy at that place. I bet Las Vegas is wondering what on earth came to town!!

I am eager to hear feedback from him and I will do my best to track him down or Jean Claude Goldenstein, the founder of http://www.creopoint.com or others that will be sure to attend. Once I do, I will give you the report and a take away. Many of the people from all of the major software accounting houses are there, along with the technology SaaS people, like Dale Vanderlaan of Realogic and his team. We will find out what and how things went down and share it right here for all of us to learn.

But the icing on the cake of all of this. And this is a true story, for real, totally accurate. I got 3 very fuzzy pictures today. So fuzzy, I do not believe they are real. I actually asked my friend Stan if these were real. He said yes, these are real. Here are 3 pictures of the first that I have ever seen, APPM units. APPM=Automated Property Management Machines. No joke. Read the fuzzy words on the screen. It brings a tear to me eye, it is so awesome. I am hoping that Stan will give me more information on these fuzzy pictures. He had better not be kidding. If it is true and these are real machines (outside of the U.S., of course!) You will all be the very, very first to hear of this. Stay tuned.

APMM = Automated Property Management Machine

Value.

Ask me anything about technology or efficiency or automation or websites or whatever. If I do not know, I can find out.

Before that however, you have to have the basics. Today, you must be Informed and Equipped so you really do bring Value to your Properties, Facilities, Companies, Organizations. DO NOT bury your head in the sand. Spend this downtime getting really, really Valuable.

Every PM/FM professional must have and/or at least understand the below and its potential, both personally and professionally. How many of the below items can you articulate to an employer, employee, student, client, etc.?:

Anti Virus Software
Anti Malware
Anti Spyware
Computer Cleaning/Maintenance Tools and why
Automatic Microsoft Updates and why (sorry Apple, this is for the masses)
External Hard Drive + Automatic Back up + Additional Back up
FREE Online photo album
FREE Online document sharing
FREE Online calendar
FREE email account or two
The Twitter concept is not a stupid gimmick
Online PR Tools
FREE VoIP phone number and voicemail
FREE conference calling service
Online fax service
Why Notepad and html is so powerful
ISP = Utility
FREE Social Media account or two
Domain name
A website to call your own and a basic understanding of it
FREE tools for everything imaginable are everywhere

If any of this is of any interest to anybody, I am happy to go on and on and on with information. I do not want to freak you out or scare you, just make you and your projects better equipped.

I cannot imagine managing a property without the above under any condition. I need the above to function and manage my property as efficiently as possible.

Do others agree or am I just a freak here? If anyone wants to help me, jump in. If you think I am off base, just say so.

Thanks,
Linda@ManagerLabs.com

Well the property and facility management industry is inundated with acronyms: PM, FM, ROI, NOI, MLS, IREM, CCIM, BOMA, TI, LO, LOI, you get the drift. But now the industry is being exposed to terminology and acronyms that the tech world and many others, hopes will change the industry forever. The term is SaaS, or Software As A Service. In other words, an automation that is online and can be called a tool or portal. With SaaS, everyone is delivered the same software via a browser that you use for FREE or with a subscription, just like any other subscription service.

The point of SaaS is to actually provide service that enables you to automate or streamline the current process or method you are using today in your offices and improve service delivery and/or reduce your labor and overhead. For example, we all have heard of Lock Box, Multiple Listing Services (MLS), and Online Banking. Now the next generation of online technology has started with a multitude of products and tools that are above and beyond those traditional shared software, now online, products. The products vary from website portals that deliver template formats for property websites to payment processing and bill paying. Everything consumers have been enjoying at home for years! In addition, all of the Cloud products, such as document storage, email and online productivity applications are basically SaaS services as well. With the Property Management industry fraught with overhead and a multitude of remote sites, SaaS and Cloud should be on any companies radar as an alternative.

It is very exciting to find blogs, such as Software Advice where you can read about the Property and Facility Management industry and its migration to this evolution by our industry with technology. It is about time we get our act together and reduce our redundancy, provide 24/7/365 service to our customers, create standards, eliminate the pain of training, pool our resources, create economies of scale, and improve our accuracy. The author of the blog, Chris Thorman is a member of several groups I belong to on LinkedIn and I offered to share his basic and easy to understand article at his Software Advice blog for software advice to the Property Management Industry.

Consider joining our family of LinkedIn groups:

PFMI (Property and Facility Management Innovators)

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=1858850

–Vendor Bidding Lab (beta) subgroup of PFMI

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=2238793

–PFMC(Property Facility Management Companies) subgroup of PFMI

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=2644670

Rooftop Gardening

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=143300

Certified Property Managers (CPM Group)
Need to be listed in IREM Membership Roster.

http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=138868

Join me at Maven Research too: https://www.mavenresearch.com/join/4G4Y4QmB

Please take this one question poll about how you process work orders. It should take you 5 seconds to respond!

Everyone in the Property Management and Facility Management industry is looking at how they do things. It is a good time to take a pulse on what methodolgy the industry is using for work orders?

Check out this poll and take the poll yourself.

Thanks,
Linda@ManagerLabs.com

Click here: http://polls.linkedin.com/p/82981/bfkgx

If you think being a Property Manager is about maintenance, utilities, contracting, technology advances or troubleshooting, you are sadly mistaken. Property Management is about “Customer Service” first. The entire purpose and being of a Property Manager is about tenant satisfaction and tenant retention. There is nothing else it is about.

With each maintenance item, utility bill, new technology and contract signed, it is about the end result: Customer Satisfaction and Service. It is probably the last thing you hear folks talk about or plan for or think of, and it should be the first! Each day you are on the job you need to start your day with: What have I done for the tenants today? If you ask that question and honestly address it, you will be an excellent Property Manager. Remember, if the tenants are happy, the building owner should be happy.

Happy Tenants Here!

Now, I know there are some building owners who are never happy and will never care if the tenants are happy. There are always a few bad apples in every batch, but for the most part, savvy building owners who really care about the bottom line do get it. It is really the naive building owner who does not get it. Quite simply, tenant retention is everything about Property Management.

With times being so tough it forces many to realize that their treatment of their tenants will surely rear its ugly head if the tenants have not been considered first. When you think about it, this just makes good business sense. Why would any business operate against the customer? Why would any business plan its operations around annoying customers? It makes you wonder sometimes when tenants are treated badly or ignored. That is absolutely insane. Why would you not answer the phone with each ring or respond like a lightning bolt with each work order request? I say it is pure training and education. Most folks who are trained or mentored are not always taught the importance of being nice and the simple rule that the customers come first.

Today it is paramount. It is not optional. The tenants must be considered and respected or they will move. It is that simple. When you look at the massive effort it takes to find a NEW tenant! OMG, you are lame if you do not treasure the tenants you have. If a tenant moves, that should be like a knife in your heart and it should hurt really bad. Nobody wants to lose a tenant today.

Now I realize that there are tenants who go out of business; but I am talking about a tenant who moves to another location. You must avoid that at all costs! You should never let a tenant leave your building. All of the staff must have that drilled into their heads. It must be the #1 thing they eat, drink and sleep, literally. It should be like propaganda on everything they use or work with. Make it your tag line and make it stick. Put it at the bottom of every timesheet, email or on every work order ticket. No matter what you do, every single member of the operations, housekeeping, security, contracting, suppliers and so on, must know this is your entire reason for being.

Once you are sure each member of your team is committed, the next thing is to create your program each year. Literally walk through each month of the year and create a theme or program or whatever you can do. It must involve everyone. That means, contracting services, staff members, and any other groups who touch your tenants must be on board with the plan. Include your contracting service vendors in the events and in sponsoring the events. The motto must be – We are in business because of the tenants and we appreciate the business very much!! That can be said in a ton of different ways, but you get the drift. Create a code word that equals your message.

If you come to the building every day with that message in your head, it will make a difference. Just think about being in the tenants’ shoes. How do they see the building, the staff, the contract service vendors? Do they see a group of folks they are proud to work with or do they see sloppy and messy or rude folks? All of that makes a difference and can make a tenant move as a result.

There is no room for error here. The Property Manager is the leader of the team and the leader must think of the tenants in every project, every thought, every maintenance plan, etc. How you ask? Well first of all communication is the #1 thing. Today there is so much technology you can use for free, especially email. Be sure all of the occupants of your property know what is going on. That is the most effortless and basic thing you can do. For instance, if you are doing anything to improve the building, tell them about it. Also let the tenants know what to expect. That is the most basic rule of customer service. Hang signs, hand out flyers, whatever you can do. Plaster it in the restrooms, whatever works for your configuration or building traffic flow. Nobody wants to walk in to the office and ask, what is going on. They should already know. Give all tenants advance notice!! Do not wait until the last minute. Why? Because that tenant may be planning a big event themselves, or they may have VIP visitors coming to town. Encourage them to tell you about their significant visitors or meetings. Why? Because you can help to welcome those visitors as well. You can spread the word to the staff to be on the look out or to help people get into the building with boxes or whatever. It is jumping through hoops and making them feel special.

There are so many ideas on tenant retention and most of them are truly common sense and not rocket scientist level stuff. They are old fashioned and traditional courtesies or ideas that show people you care. Your goal is to have the nicest and friendliest staff in the world! If you can create a powerful team, you have it cinched. If you have cranky or ornery folks among you, they will have to go if they fail to follow your leadership. I am sorry to say, but you will have to hire nice people who can deliver the best customer service possible. Do not compromise that point. You can always give folks a chance to change, but if they do not change, they must be asked to leave.

Just remember to ask yourself – What have I done for the tenants today? – and if you do that simple thing each day, you will be on the road to excellent Property Management and superior Customer Service which all lead to high levels of tenant retention that you can count on at your property.

Surf and Ride

Peoria Charter Service Bus

I am at a roadside rest area and I do a double take. Did I just read what I think I read on the side of that huge Greyhound Bus? What does that giant skin on that bus say? Now I see the bus driver coming towards me, and as my reporter instinct tells me, grab him and find out!! I did just that.  He was so proud to tell me that, yes, his riders can surf the web while they drive down the highway!! Wow, now that is really innovation. The Peoria Charter Bus company travels between a university town, Champaign, Illinois to Chicago, several times per day. The owner of the bus company said, why not give the passengers wifi. And so they did.

McDonalds Free Wifi

McDonalds has Wifi

My husband and I frequent McDonalds and it is not for the hamburgers! We go to McDonalds for the coffee, yogurt parfaits and wifi. We have been doing this for years. The wifi was never free, until now! Yes, at every McDonalds you can go in with your laptop and get awesome high speed internet access.

Virgin America plans Wi-Fi launch party in the sky

Virgin Airlines has wifi

Just a few months ago I saw a headline about Virgin America Airlines.Virgin America Airlines (yes flying) is now offering wifi on its planes and flights. I did not know they had wifi at all. So when you are flying to a destination you can use your laptop. How convenient is that!

My point is that we as PM / FM professionals have to see that internet access is no longer optional. If you cannot bring wifi areas to your property, what is the speed bump? Now, I am not saying this has to be the fully functional network for the occupants to conduct business, not yet at least, but at least have some lounges or lobbies with some wifi.  Make it super easy, at their own risk and see what kind of deal you can find from your local ISP.  Maybe exchange it for a plug or advertising signage, so it is FREE for the lounge or lunch area, or vending area. I say, if there is a will there is a way.  A router costs nothing, so try to get FREE service if you can. Ask the vending machine operator to sponsor it, or anybody with a vested interest in your occupants.  But for heaven’s sake, do not ignore it. Wifi is here and it is not a fad, it is a basic utility. It is our job to make it happen!

How healthy is your Organization’s Core? Every time you hear a ringing phone, think about it.  I would bet that if you attended Realcomm 2009 in Chicago over the past 3 days, you know exactly what I am talking about. If you did not attend, you MUST attend next year. Get out the coffee can and start saving your money. If your company cannot afford it, pay your own way. Visit www.realcomm.com for more information.

The well being of your corporate infrastructure depends on it! To survive your organizations core must now run 24/7/365. There is no more 9 to 5. It is obsolete terminology.  There is no time for processes to cease or take a break. Today is a 24/7/365 world and the pace is getting faster and more efficient. Is your infrastructure gaining speed or losing speed? Are you hearing ringing around your offices? If so, you need to focus and reduce those ringing phones.

Think about investing small sums by trading the wasted labor expense it takes for a permanent solution that can be used over and over again. Consider the growth opportunities if you can do more with less.  This is not about eliminating people at all. It is about retraining people and realigning people. Grow the business itself, not for the sake of growing the labor pool, as many of us have done in the past.

Our industry is jam packed with business intelligence and we need to discover and unearth it. Our industry holds the key to a massive opportunity for somebody, and that somebody should be you!  The data we all share and the information we all have is vital and it is being unearthed.

Everyone is now relating to one another 24/7/365 via the internet.  People no longer want to wait for your office to open at 9:00 a.m. That is almost silly to even think of today.  What is your own reaction to waiting or being told “No”? Ask yourself that question every time your phone rings. A ringing phone should truly be the bell that goes off in your head. If there is a will, there is the internet.  If you need something you go online and just get it.

You must invest in your Organizational Core. Automate tasks, digitalize Documents, minimize paper, embrace technology, and embrace the change. The challenge for us as an industry is three fold:  ego, money and awareness.  Ego for those that believe their way is better; money for those who have the money now and do not want to lose it (ie, large software companies that will soon be obsolete); awareness for those that do not know about the movement.

There are a few organizations pioneering industry wide standards that you need to be aware of:

Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate – (OSCRE) – http://www.oscre.org   “Deliver global standards for exchanging electronic real property information and drive their adoption”

Multifamily Information and Transactions Standard – (MITS) – http://www.mitsproject.com/ “MITS is an industry-wide effort by the apartment sector to develop common data standards and extensible mark-up language (XML) protocol to facilitate data and systems integration.

Realcomm – http://www.realcomm.com,  Jim Young, Founder. The intersection of Commercial Real Estate Corporate Real Estate, & Technology.

Manager Labs – http://www.managerlabs.com, Geoff Domoracki and Linda Day Harrison, CPM, CCIM, Founders. Where the concepts of the future, become a reality for the industry today. An organization dedicated to providing all PM / FM firms and related Vendor Services, the opportunity to embrace technology, identify technology and utilize technology before they buy the technology. Bring your need or idea to this group and we will execute it as a prototype to prove out its effectiveness and ROI.

Each of these organizations are progressive, consciously and consistently providing the cutting edge to our industry. Your Organizational Core is depending on you.  Keep your core healthy and consider any and all the baby steps that are available to embrace the new ways.  Almost all of our mundane and redundant efforts can be automated. Going forward make a pact with yourself to think about your Organization’s Core and whether or not your decisions and actions are working towards a healthy core. Test yourself and watch what is physically going on around you and every time you hear that ringing phone, think of it as your wake up call.

When your day is spent trying to revolutionize an industry, it can be rather exciting yet a little frustrating at the same time. Not only do you have to get the word out to millions of people, but you also have all of those who ignore you when they hear ‘change’. Those people may agree with you that they want everything to be done faster and cheaper, so long as it stays the same. We always start out by reminding them that there can be very little progress without change, but it is hard for them to swallow that part of progress as it relates to changing anything. Progress they want, change they do not want. In order for a property manager to be able to say, Yes and Now to each customer, building owner, staff member, vendor, leasing broker or anyone they encounter, there must be a monumental change within the industry to make this dramatic progress a reality. We are hoping, like so many people, that by adding Greening to the concept it might take off. It seems that anything about Greening or The Environment is popular. As property managers we need to start Greening ourselves.

For us to become a green industry our effort will be more than just recycling, it will have to include creating standards, minimizing training, eliminating redundancy, identifying the appropriate tools and stopping the madness of starting over every time a new property is assigned to us and minimizing the horrific pain when a property is taken away or sold. If and when, we as an industry, empower ourselves as property managers to provide Yes and Now solutions, there will be a great efficiency or greening of the property management world. The greening will take place throughout every facet of the physical property as well. The greening will impact actual costs and improve customer retention, lower employee turnover and increase the actual value of the property if we all pull together and green this industry.

For over 2 ½ decades I have been in property management, with the majority of those years in the field, at the frontline. The frontline is an appropriate description of those persons in a company who deal with the customers. When you are at the front, the demands come from various directions. Those challenges come from the general public, existing customers, building ownership, the local municipality, the corporate office, vendors or even our own property staff, and usually all at the same time. There is a constant barrage and an endless flow of expectations, with internal conflicts. Herein lies the problem or dilemma.

For instance, the customers expect us to be at our desk at all times to answer their questions or answer the phone when they call. The building owner wants us to walk the property each day and insure all things are in top condition, while watching every single penny spent and every single penny collected. The property manager is also held accountable for each member of the building staff and the assurance to ownership and our corporate office that the staff is being supervised with eagle eyes. Those high standards are expected at the on-site office we are assigned to, in addition to the other 6 properties we manage.

The corporate office wants reports done on time so the accounting department is insured immediate response to their inquiries or needs. When a broker inquires about space available, those tenant rep brokers want the answers now. The local municipality expects us to be at the ready and drop everything, on a moment’s notice to do a full building or fire inspection so we comply with all codes and ordinances. All of the vendors want to be paid immediately after performing their services and the vendors will call repeatedly until we can tell them the exact time they will be paid. Simultaneous to this we are listening to the property leasing broker on the other line who is impatiently waiting for feedback on a 7 page, lease proposal that he/she needs to have our feedback on within the next 15 minutes. All while there is another tenant standing in the office appalled that the illegal car in their parking space has not yet been towed, along with the staff member who wishes to find out why their paycheck was shorted 1.5 hours overtime.

All of the above scenarios can be made less painful if we pull together and start a grassroots effort to revolutionize the property management industry and take the property manager out of the line of fire by igniting a movement towards creating an environment whereby the property manager or the frontline staff, can truly find the time to provide excellent customer service. In addition, immediate responsiveness to the general public, our customers, the building staff, the government, the corporate office and the vendors who all believe they are entitled to receive answers now and make us a Green industry.

Because the industry is bogged down with redundancy, limited standardization, dysfunctional tools, insane repetition and wasted motion, we are the biggest culprits of waste and ineffiency. Today, with all of the creative electronic gadgets and sleek cell phones, why is a property manager ordering 3-part NCR work order pads from Peachtree, bulletin boards to post notices, reams and reams of paper to print statements, newsletters and other legal notices, cases of timecards for the staff to punch in and punch out, binders to store records and logs, and tons of envelopes to mail out the paper coupon books, paper invoices, vendor paper checks and paper remittance stubs and letters imploring the vendors to provide the paper certificates of insurance or other vendor compliance requirements? The reason is simple. We are not creating cohesive systems or systems of any kind. With cohesive systems that communicate, the redundancy will be gone, the manual task will be gone, the errors will be gone and the service will be improved.

There is a group tackling these challenges right now. If you have heard of the organization Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate (OSCRE) you are on the right track. This group is taking the challenge head on. OSCRE understands the key is to create standards across all firms. OSCRE is doing this very task in a very impressive fashion. As a group, those of us at ManagerLabs.com are studying the OSCRE standards and investigating how we as web developers and technology innovators can embrace this profound effort to standardize the property management industry. In a conference call with one of the OSCRE leaders last week, we were given an overview of the various standards already in place. ManagerLabs.com will continue to monitor the OSCRE processes and keep spreading the word about this important step in the process of improving the property management industry. If you take the standards and connect this to all of our systems, we will all be able to share data across any database, no matter what accounting system, work order system, commercial listing service or lease abstract system.

Our mission at ManagerLabs.com is to connect all of these dots so things can truly be ‘touch it once’. Every aspect of managing any asset should be treated as a giant template. Once this template is in place, simply change the names and fill in the blanks. If we, as an industry can start looking at standards, practices, systems and procedures as templates, we can truly be a much Greener industry.

For more information on OSCRE or to join this group, visit http://www.oscre.org.

There may be some that wield high tech tools of sorts, but overall the property/facility management and commercial real estate industry is lacking the technology that would unleash power into its systems and processes.  Because we are so busy making our clients money, counting light bulbs and managing labor to the tiniest penny, we typically fall short of optimizing our workflow.  In my 25 years of experience, I have realized that the pathway for our industry to dig itself out of this low profit margin hole is by embracing the tools that exist today. It has always been my personal mission or desire to demonstrate that a property manager can go from 0 to 60 with the right tools and infrastructure at their fingertips, simultaneously providing clients and customers with a higher level of service.

There are managers who do not yet have automated work order systems, dispatch capabilities or automated monthly owner reports and early on in my career it became apparent to me that this inefficiency ultimately had an impact on the bottom line. It was in an office akin to a mini-Kinkos of sorts, producing upwards of 18 partners books per month, where I realized the gap that was emerging in our industry. I will never forget the moment when we were actually able to convince one single client to permit us to email a PDF to them. That was a huge milestone in my career and one I will never forget. We were so proud that out of 55 clients, one single client would permit such high tech delivery! This huge triumph over the antiquated way of business, opened my eyes to how cost effective and efficient things could now be given the technological advances. 

Despite the advances, our industry was still slow to adapt, and for me the gap between technology and the property managers became exceedingly more of a problem.  The way Property Managers operated was unnecessary, redundant and even absurd in some cases. Tasks that were taking days could take the click of a button, streamlining and accelerating my business, leaving me freed up to provide quality customer service; walking the property or meeting with potential new customers; working with leasing on creating new ways to lease our buildings; taking customers to lunch; working with programmers to develop a comprehensive and effective website; producing a newsletter; hosting a tenant retention activity; even staff training day.  All of these useful and creative projects had taken a backseat to the repetitive, wasteful functions that currently occur in the normal course of a property/facility manager’s day and the industry cannot afford to tolerate this any longer.

There are a few simple things that we can begin to adopt now that will take the industry from 0 to 60. The first is cross industry standards various templates for all of our databases and that will allow software systems to talk with each other. When all of our software is communicable, we will eliminate redundancy and exchange information with clicks instead of paper and laborious data re-entry. The second is connectivity and communication. It is not necessary for a manager to be tied to a desk, in fact a good property manager is mobile without compromising the inflow of requests or customer service needs. The manager is always available and reachable with the tools to dispatch requests and monitor the vendors or projects at all the properties they oversee.  The third is effectively utilizing the Internet as a fundamental component of customer service… Adopt these principles of standards, utilizing the Internet and management mobility and you will empower the property/facility management industry. Not only will you provide the speed and improve the quality, but you will provide your clients and customers with the excellent service they deserve from today’s up to speed, property/facility manager.