Revolutionising property reporting & driving efficiency with Hydra

The situtation

As one of Australia’s leading property agencies, and part of a global real estate group, Savills Australia takes its position as a market leader very seriously. Their customer service and their ability to offer expert advice and market analysis are two keys ways they have to differentiate themselves from the competition.

Savills recognised that their current means of reporting to owners of managed properties was not meeting that standard. Static spreadsheets–both time-consuming to compile and not particularly easy to read–were clearly not good enough, while the interactive solutions being used by some competitors were limited in their capabilities, providing poor value for money given the cost of implementation. In a fully connected, data-driven world, the demand for something better was clear.

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The challenge

Savills wanted to impress their clients with a user-friendly dashboard featuring drillable, real-time data. But that meant developing a completely new reporting platform, not to mention combining data from separate systems that, in some cases, currently had to be manually compiled.

It was precisely for this sort of challenge that Hydra was developed. The powerful platform provides a range of tools that make it possible to customise your software ecosystem, unify your data and unlock its full potential, all while avoiding the time and expense usually associated with bespoke software development.

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The process

Working to the brief sketched out by Savills, we used Hydra to develop a property management dashboard with capabilities far beyond the existing reports. The power and flexibility of Hydra meant we were able to work collaboratively with Savills, adding or expanding features on the fly according to their feedback.

Savills’ new property management reports feature real-time data dashboards for property owners, making it easy and intuitive to access the information most pertinent to them. At the same time, Hydra also generates paginated reports with the ability to add comments and annotations online, shared in real-time with other viewers of the report.

With this phase of the project completed, Savills expanded the brief to take in tenant-side communications and reporting. Using Hydra, we created a series of SmartForms to collect information from tenants and flow it straight into their software system. This not only saves a great deal of time but also removes the opportunity for any errors in data entry.

Meanwhile, bespoke portals allow tenants to view and enter information or log maintenance issues, creating a further significant time saving.

Despite the complexity involved, Hydra makes sure all parties–owners, managers and tenants–can access the information they need in the most efficient way. As an added bonus, because it is Hydra hosting these reports and portals, no additional licenses for Savills’ main real estate software package are required to allow tenants and owners to engage with their information.

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The result

The end result for Savills Australia is a greatly improved customer experience—with significant increases in efficiency at the same time. David Watson, Savills' National General Manager for Property & Asset Management said:

"We see this as cutting-edge in terms of what it’s doing and how we’re using the product.

We’ve shown the new property management reports to half a dozen clients already and they all love it. And on our side, the accounting team have come back to us and said that they expect to save 25-30% of their time.

The whole development process has been really impressive. TopUp really understand our commercial priorities and are so good at anticipating the issues and bringing us solutions. As for Hydra, it really enables us to bring all our software services together and report on everything through the one portal.

Would I recommend Hydra to others? No, I don’t want anyone else to have it! It really is that good.”

Find out how you can realise your business goals with Hydra: the digital solution builder for modern real estate business. Book a demo.

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