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What is management information systems?

Small Business Real Estate: What is the best way to go about creating different Management Information Systems for a company?

  • I am interning for a Chicago-based real estate company.  It is a small business of roughly a dozen employees, specializes in commercial and industrial properties (but is not limited within these), and is aiming at innovating itself and attempting to keep up with current, as well as tomorrow's, technological, information systems.  In short, my summer project is to aim at putting a high portion of the company's records and information into a cloud-based, management information system. The information, itself, is not the concern.  I am looking more for advice or example instances people can lend that can aim me in the right direction to go about the project - free lance a contractor or team, hire a company that does this, any suggestions really. Thanks for any comments or answers!

  • Answer:

    First off I think Christopher did a great job in breaking down the mechanics of what you would need to develop this project. Now being that you did state that you hold a small firm of 12 employees and I am going to assume they live within the general area so I don't believe that yours will be as large of an undertaking as was Christophers may have been.   I will break it down in 5 basic steps for you so that you can get an understanding as to what order in which you need develop this project. Data - I am sure that you have an offline application / database that you are able to store your data in currently. You need to verify that the data currently stored can be exported into a .csv or zip file as most online databases such as MySQL will have the ability to import them. Building this information from scratch isn't impossible but definitely painstaking. CRM - Stands for Customer Relationship Management software is usually web baed software that will allow for you to store contact/customer information and any data related to the customer online (ie. Contact Info, Call Info, Purchasing History, Notes, Birthday Information, Status Info). This can be done in one of two ways, some CRM's are cloud based such as http://SalesForce.com or http://SugarCRM.com while others are available to either hosted on a webserver that you build or lease online. I am currently building this system for a Real Estate Broker in Los Angeles utilizing a core vTiger CRM but building it for the needs of a Real Estate Brokerage Firm. Utilizing an Open Source platform such as this allows for the development to expand beyond what the initial developer had in mind. The data that is exported from your current application can be imported into your CRM. Think of the CRM as the heart of your application infrastructure. Do your homework and research the differences between them, some offer a mobile platform as well as a standard web-based application so that your Real Estate Officers can access their data from outside of the office without the need for a laptop. Website - Now a modern website isn't just a bunch of Static HTML Code just slapped together for the sake of having a website. Your website should be database driven that allows for the developer to integrate forms into your CRM. This becomes your new Lead Generation Tool for new prospects and leads as they come to your site, view and send information to you from your site that can be pushed or pulled into your CRM. What your potential customers view is the website, what your employees log into and view is the CRM. Storage - Now that you understand the applications needed to run your cloud based infrastructure you need to think about storage. If you develop and host the sites inhouse then you can manage and build storage as needed but if you use a web hosting company you need to make sure that storage isn't going to be an issue. To the very least, you need to verify with the host that if you need to expand or add on more storage that the option is available for you. Besides your customer contact data, what other forms of data do you plan on storing on your web server to make available for your Employees? Do you want to load brochures and flyers? Video and podcasts? If so all that data adds up and so you need to make sure that you have adequate storage to host all that data. Amazon offers a scalable platform for expanding businesses that is very cost effectiive, just google "Amazon EC2". Backup - The very last thing you would ever want to happen is to have all of your data lost due to your lack of backing things up. If you are self hosting make sure that you backup all of your database(s) information at the very least, if you have a good backup solution then monthly or quarterly, backup the site and CRM as well. Make several solutions for your backup, meaning look into both online and offline backups so that no matter what, you data is available if by chance you ever need to restore it. Dependant on your technical background this could be an overwhelming project or one that you can take on with a comprehensive plan. Hopefully if you take your time and break it down as I have done for you, you may be able to tackle this project and create a successful cloud based infrastructure.

Eric Swain at Quora Visit the source

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WoW, what an undertaking. I certainly can appreciate your desired end result, but getting there is going to be really challenging without a very significant budget. First, I have experience in attempting to accomplish this same task. I've owned three commercial real estate brokerage companies two of which were significant in revenue and one which had a large employee base, 35 brokers, which for an independent commercial brokerage is a large office. My recommendation would be to focus initially on infrastructure. The sourcing of data in CRE is fragmented and comes from multiple sources, and many of these sources make their data proprietary, so you'll need to understand how that data is used by the end users before you can design the most appropriate infrastructure. Some questions you might consider asking: How many tenant data sources are being used. How many ownership data sources are being used. How many listing (MLS) sources are being used. How is this data now captured, inventoried, manipulated, and reports created from it. What, and where, is the CRM portion of this data housed, how is the CRM used, and how easy would it be to integrate that CRM into the newly created infrastructure. What service, app, or process is used to create information such as listing presentations, property brochures, MLS brochures, quarterly market reports, etc. How many users currently exist that would need access to the new system, and how can it be expanded on an as needed basis. After you have all of this information, and then some, you'll need to have the top influencer's with the company help you understand their current work process based on what technology tools and systems they currently have now, and then ask them for their ideal work process if they could just create nirvana. One of the major hurdles you may encounter is the data itself. If the company is using a source like CoStar for their data then you're going to be challenged in extracting that data electronically. CoStar considers there data proprietary and there terms of service prohibit a bulk downloading of that data, and it also prohibits (if I remember correctly) to storage of that data in any other electronic format. I went through this with them several years ago, and even paid my attorney to look into it in depth, but the risks for a lawsuit were to great so we didn't end up using their data. I even paid my database company an exorbitant amount of money to prepare an export and import tool. The similar also applies to Loopnet which only allows a hard copy receipt of their data. The last data system I had built was from a company called REAPPS which was a custom built data storage database. Its was a system built to operate in the cloud, but it required an annual maintenance contract and although good for our purposes was far from perfect. They were acquired by Loopnet a couple of years ago which I think was a take out the competition acquisition by Loopnet. And you may be aware that CoStar just closed on the acquisition of Loopnet. So I don't expect you'll see them rolling out an enterprise data storage system anytime soon. CRE as an industry has been criticized for its late adoption of technology. I argue that its not that operators in CRE don't want to take full advantage of technology but rather its because of the fragmented nature of each and every data source that its almost impossible for any one company, excepting perhaps the one or two largest CRE companies, to build out the infrastructure (or manipulate the data into electronic formats) in any sort of way that makes economic sense.

Christopher Telles

Christopher:  What a great project for someone like yourself.  It boils down to SYSTEMS.  Once you have put all of the systems in place your company will run like a well oiled machine.  I suggest that you real The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, that Gary Keller founder of Keller Williams has written.  It has a proven record of successes.  That model is a brillant model and works for large companies as well as small start up companies.  In fact Gary and his team put these systems in place when they were a small start up compan and today Keller Williams Worldwide uses these models to run thier regions.

Linda D'Ambrosi

I suggest you contact LoneWolf Technologies in Cambridge Ontario Canada. The system they offer is deployed in 9,000 office locations in the in the USA & Canada. This is a front end to back end system.

Greg O'Donnell

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