As the real estate industry has slowly begun to embrace technology, larger players have made investments in information technology personnel and infrastructure. But smaller players have avoided the high costs of automating their processes.

Now there are no excuses.

CTI Limited has become an application service provider (ASP), offering property management system software, maintenance, hardware and support. Prices start at $360 per user per month.

“We can provide same system that the biggest players in the marketplace get to the smallest customers,” said Craig Lofton, executive vice president. “We have just completed construction of our data center. The thing that makes this a viable solution is the internet.”

Dallas-based CTI sells knowledge management technologies to the real estate industry. According to the company, nearly 30 percent of investment-grade real estate in the United States is managed by CTI's integrated application systems.

ASPs are becoming more common across all industries, essentially allowing clients to “rent” software and hardware, rather than make a bulky up-front investment.

CTI made history in the real estate industry in 1996 when it introduced the first internet-enabled property management solution. From anywhere in the world, the system could be accessed and data manipulated in real time.

The company touts financial knowledge management as a strategic weapon whose tactical power comes from integrated applications that organize every property management procedure step by step.

"On the front end, streamlined leasing apps let brokers close deals faster to boost occupancy and revenues,” Lofton said. "On the asset management side of the equation, we slashed one client's quarterly portfolio review process from nine weeks to a single day. That's 36 weeks freed up each year, dynamic return on investment."

Despite these new systems, which have taken other industries by storm, real estate companies still are slow to jump on the technology bandwagon. Why?

“Traditionally, real estate companies have been privately owned by entrepreneurs,” Lofton said. “All of the overhead to support them in deal-making was largely viewed as a cost of doing business. Accounting and technology were at the end of the food chain.”

‘This is a problem in about 99.9 percent of real estate companies,” he added. “Real estate organizations until lately have run exactly the same way as they have for the past 50 years. Procedurally, the way they process a transaction … has really largely been unchanged until just recently.”

So why are these companies beginning to see value in IT investment? According to Lofton, it’s the transformation of companies from private to public.

“That has been one of the biggest drivers in the increase of automation technology in real estate companies,” Lofton said. “With fast systems, it’s much easier for these managers to have numbers available for their analysts.

“Public (real estate) companies are getting better management,” he added. “They are bringing in professional managers that have a combination of real estate and management skills. These managers are new and young, and they are more prone to invest in technology than previous generations.”

Published: July 6, 1999

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