The projects add-on is a premium Rex feature. For more information, please contact support@rexsoftware.com.au. Surrounding our office in Newstead, Brisbane, are approximately three billion cranes; each one working tirelessly on another huge apartment block. If you’ve visited Melbourne or Sydney recently, you’ll have noticed a similar situation. Massive projects are apparently all the rage. This is great news if you’re a project marketer. The bad news is that you’re probably trying to sell the seemingly infinite number of new apartments with a mixture of spreadsheets and old project marketing software lacking the functionality you’ve come to know and love in Rex. We figured we’d help out by expanding.
The projects module - project marketing software made easy
We’ve been firing out feature releases over the last six months like mad – go to related, system lists, endless changes to feedback and vendor reporting, CSV exports, saved filters, updates to leads – the list goes on. These are all great additions to the system in their own right - but we were really laying down the foundations for a whole new module dedicated to project marketing. So how do you tackle something as complicated as sales and marketing for property developments and land estates? To organise the abundance of properties for sale in a project we needed to create two new record types: projects and stages.
Projects
Once you’ve enabled the projects add-on, you’ll notice a new projects option in the Listings dropdown.
The projects screen shows a list of all your current and historical projects. You’re no doubt well aware of how the go to related and filter functionality works by now, so you’ll see how beneficial this innocuous, little list is. From here, you’ll be able to navigate to any subset of records that relates to your project: think contacts, project stages, invoices, leads, project listings, active holds, contracts – you name it. Alternatively, simply click into your project of choice and you’ll be greeted by a familiar layout:
To keep things as familiar and intuitive as possible, key details, finances and other functionality will appear familiar to those available for regular listings. To make it easier to manage financials for project listings, we’ve replicated financials functionality (including Trust, VPA, invoices and payments). This can now be accessed from the top level project, for project stages and, as always regular listings. The project is a ‘parent’ record: the foundation of your project pyramid that brings all the stages and listings together. Vendor reports, correspondence, marketing material, feedback, reminders, tracks – and anything else that relates to the project as a whole - can be stored and accessed in one place.Next up: the project stage.
Stages
Stages are time bound, with different construction projections, availability and property characteristics. Like project records, stages look and feel like regular listing records - though again they’re quite different.
As you can see, the major difference between a stage and project record are a number of new key details fields. Stages include dates for construction projections, construction completion, releases and title issues so you can track development to keep your potential buyers in the know. Stage-related documents, feedback and reminders can also be filed against your stage record to help keep you organised and ensure smooth sailing between precise data sets.
Stock / Inventory mode
There’s another notable feature we’ve added to your stage and project records. Because of the volume of related data that attaches to these types of records, we thought it would be helpful to aggregate the most useful data in a new stock mode - similar to the finance mode you’d normally see on a regular listing record. Project marketing software should make things easier, afterall.Hence, stock mode.
Stock mode is a big part of the new Projects module - allowing you to easily jump between tabs of your most important records. It’s the autobahn you’ll use to speed between related records and data sets. Now you can quickly bring up lists of all stages, listings, current contracts and active holds in that project or stage for a quick overview and ease of navigation. Oh yeah - speaking of holds…
Holds
Holds, reservations – whatever you call them – you can’t manage projects without them. Holds can now be added and tracked from the legal tab on your Listing Records.
As well as including holds in both your stage and project records, we added some further safety measures to make sure you don’t miss any that are expiring. You need to touch base with the buyer well in advance of their hold falling through, so we’ve added a new expiring holds section to the stream on your dashboard.
The expiring holds list lets you view/update the hold, go to a related record for quick follow-up or, if need be, mark as fallen.
Contracts
Contracts haven’t really changed much for this release, (except that we list relevant contracts in stock mode). However, there is one shiny, new bonus feature you‘re going to want to check out. Now, when adding a contract, you’ll see a market research tab.
It’s all well and good to track enquiries – but the best market research comes off the back of actual sales. Let’s be honest, not all enquiries are created equal. And often times, that’s because not all marketing is created equal either. Property developments usually have pretty outrageous marketing budgets. If your vendor is spending hundreds of thousands on billboards, websites and all kinds of extravagance, they’re going to need to understand what’s really bringing in the dollars. Now, when you’re adding a Sale or Purchase Agreement, you can quickly flick over to the market research tab and jot down the data you and vendor need to make your marketing analysis far richer. The market research feature is being released this to our entire user base.
The benefits
True to our philosophy of a ‘single point of truth’, the project marketing software add-on will be of benefit to anyone selling property developments. Project marketers we have worked with in the past have used as many as four or five separate systems and tools as they grapple with a laundry list of duplicate data and missing functionality. The functionality we’ve built up transforms Rex into a complete software solution for project marketers. New project-specific record types aggregate your listing, contract, hold and feedback data into a single location. Key functionality rolled out over the last six months augments the new projects records, with system lists, go to related and saved filters making it quick and easy to navigate through and drill down into immense data sets. Because projects has been built out as a module within the core Rex product, users will have access to the full functionality of Australia’s most feature-rich and usable real estate CRM. This is a significant improvement of Rex's capabilities, and we hope all our project marketing clients reap the benefits.
