RPA in real estate: 10 use cases, platforms & best practices
May 29, 2024
RPA in real estate is applied to automate a wide range of repetitive and high-volume tasks, including property management and document processing. Complemented with AI algorithms, RPA bots can process unstructured data, including natural language and images, to automate more intelligent tasks.
Itransition’s experts deliver end-to-end robotic process automation services and implement RPA robots to help real estate specialists streamline tedious and time-consuming operations.
10 RPA use cases in real estate
From property and facility management to accounting and marketing, RPA can be applied in a variety of real estate business operations. Here's a brief rundown of popular RPA use cases in this industry.
Lease contract processing
Drafting and processing lease or rental agreements are subject to errors and inaccuracies, as these procedures require administrators to manage a lot of information gathered from different sources. A bot can perform these operations by extracting rental property data and entering it in standardized forms and creating a tenant account in the property management software once it has received the lessee's and landlord's digital signatures.
Tax billing & reporting
Real estate agencies can manage numerous properties subject to taxation, not to mention corporate taxes such as the CIT. Involving repetitive tasks and structured data, tax billing and reporting are well-suited to be automated with RPA. Bots can extract information from multiple tax systems, prepare property tax invoices, and compile all due fiscal documentation for competent authorities faster and more accurately than humans.
Scheme title: Example of property tax billing automation.
Data source: deloitte.com—Corporate Real Estate and Facilities Management in the digital world.
Bot interfaces with tax management system
Bot extracts data to spreadsheet
Bot manipulates data and populates monthly filings
Bot validates customers’ eligibility, status and equipment list
Bot creates invoice within customers’ ERP systems
Bot captures invoices submission confirmation details
Bot generates monthly report and distributes to team
Resident communication
RPA bots can help a business communicate and manage residents more efficiently. For example, they can send tenants payment reminders or messages about rent increases and contract renewals. Additionally, bots can process incoming payments or mark insolvent tenant accounts in the corporate system.
Tenant onboarding
This process includes many time-consuming tasks, such as processing new tenants' applications, checking for their criminal records, reviewing referrals and incomes, and proceeding to the final approval. Bots can collect all this information and fill in paperwork faster and more accurately.
Maintenance & cost management
Tracking maintenance costs and managing all the related paperwork is challenging, especially for large companies with numerous properties. RPA bots can help a real estate company streamline this business aspect. For instance, bots can automate heating, water, and electricity reporting to help real estate operators track utility costs. Additionally, bots can automatically fill in maintenance request forms and transfer them to technicians afterward.
Bank & account reconciliation
Some applications of RPA in the financial industry also prove relevant in the real estate sector. RPA bots can automate small and repetitive tasks, such as searching and extracting bank account statements from emails. Intelligent RPA tools can also reconcile transactions related to bank statements with those recorded in a company’s ERP to mitigate potential discrepancies and errors in the data.
Processing of accounts payable & receivable
RPA can facilitate inbound and outbound invoice processing, extracting salient data from incoming invoices and entering it into corporate systems or using it to draft standardized forms addressed to customers. These extraction capabilities can be further enhanced by AI, with intelligent RPA bots checking duplicate invoices to mitigate discrepancies in a company's financial reports or identifying inflated charges to prevent financial fraud.
NAV calculations
The Net Asset Value (NAV) is a fundamental yardstick for measuring the future returns of a real estate investment fund. RPA tools extract market data from multiple databases and consolidate it, automating routine activities preceding NAV calculation. Bots complemented with AI can also perform more intelligent tasks such as NAV oversight and validation.
Customer support
Virtual assistants allow customers to interact with a real estate agency 24/7, improving customer satisfaction and experience. Chat messages can trigger bots to perform relatively simple tasks, such as sending links to real estate for sale in a particular area. RPA chatbots powered by AI technologies can deliver better customer service by interpreting human speech, analyzing the context of communication, and learning from past conversations to provide more accurate and useful answers to user queries.
Marketing automation
Enhanced with AI capabilities, RPA solutions allow realtors to automate the publication of content on social media and target potential customers based on their preferences and interests. Bots can also speed up the compilation of mailing lists and automate emails sending to keep the customer base updated on the latest real estate news.
RPA + AI in action
Have a look at a demo video highlighting automated invoice processing done by a UiPath bot integrated with the Open AI model. The bot developed by Itransition’s RPA experts recognizes invoices in emails, gathers unstructured financial data from these invoices, sends it to OpenAI for data structuring and financial value extraction, and transfers values provided by the platform to the data storage.
Automate your processes with an RPA solution by Itransition
Benefits of RPA in real estate
Implementing RPA bots in your real estate business processes will help you achieve the following pay-offs.
Cost-efficiency
RPA bots perform their duties 24/7 in a fraction of the time taken by humans and operate even faster and more efficiently if complemented with AI. As highlighted by UiPath in the recent State of AI-powered Automation report, 70% of companies note time savings, while 72% report cost savings as the most common benefits of intelligent RPA automation.
Accuracy
While employees can easily get distracted after repeating yet another operation and, as a result, make mistakes, RPA robots are tireless and almost foolproof workers when carrying out straightforward rule-based tasks. According to the IT Service Management survey by OTRS, the reduction of data mistakes is the second most frequently reported business process automation benefit, cited by 18% of U.S. executives.
Compliance
The greater accuracy achieved by bots in managing administrative practices facilitates regulatory compliance, both in terms of personal data management and tax legislation. It can significantly reduce one of the main business risks, namely the likelihood of fraud and human error.
Scalability
Since RPA solutions are relatively simple and inexpensive to implement, companies can easily scale up RPA automation by adopting more bots into their business processes. RPA robots can also be smoothly integrated with a growing number of IT systems, even legacy ones, via their user interfaces.
Easier data integration
RPA’s ease of integration with existing software makes this technology ideal for connecting multiple IT systems. For example, a bot can move data from an email client to an ERP system, replacing real estate professionals who would manually extract the required information from incoming emails and upload it to the ERP.
Better customer experience
Every minute saved due to the automation of clerical and manual tasks can be redirected to client-facing operations and improve the customer experience. 93% of respondents to Camunda’s 2024 State of Process Orchestration survey say process automation has helped them improve customer experiences.
Real-life examples of RPA in real estate
- 30%
processing times
Sunway Group
One of the top Malaysian real estate firms, Sunway Group, significantly reduced processing times across 35 business operations with an AI-powered RPA solution.
$1m
in savings
WAM Group
The Brazilian leader in the fractional ownership market deployed a cloud-based RPA solution to enhance the processes of its finance, tax, and research departments.
45h > 1h
reporting time
Deloitte
Deloitte assisted a real estate multinational in implementing RPA bots to speed up its tax billing and maintenance tasks, including reporting, data extraction, and data manipulation.
700h > 400h
processing
Hoas
The Foundation for Student Housing in the Helsinki Region almost halved the processing time required to handle 8,400 housing applications after adopting RPA software robots.
Best RPA platforms for real estate
While some real estate companies prefer to develop custom RPA software, organizations prioritizing faster RPA implementation and lower upfront costs can build their solution on top of an RPA platform provided by a third-party vendor. According to Gartner's 2023 Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation, these are the five RPA market leaders.
Pros
UiPath offers a low-code UX app builder, extensive integration capabilities, and solid functionality for managing and governing UiPath automations. Users note that the platform is highly scalable, customizable, and secure.
Cons
The price is high and not suitable for small automatization projects. The pricing policy and service/product offering are rather complex, requiring workshops and explanations.
Pricing
Price on request
Pros
Automation Anywhere offers cognitive automation and analytics capabilities powered by AI, along with a strong focus on the cloud.
Cons
Customers reported that data extraction from images isn't always accurate and that upgrading from Automation Anywhere’s legacy platform to Automation 360 is rather challenging.
Pricing
Three packages (Community, Cloud Starter, and Advanced). Pricing starts at $750 per month for the Cloud pack.
Pros
SS&C Blue Prism offers numerous pre-build templates for process automation, supports multi-bot architecture, and offers intelligent automation techniques (OCR, NLP, and ML).
Cons
The platform has no trial software, offers back-office automation only, and has more limited capabilities in terms of low-code app development and API integration than competitors.
Pricing
Price on request, a choice between flat and consumption-based pricing models.
Pros
Microsoft Power Automate is more affordable compared to other RPA platforms. The platform also seamlessly integrates with the Microsoft software ecosystem, including products such as SharePoint and OneDrive, which makes it well-suited for enterprise IT infrastructures powered by Microsoft.
Cons
Power Automate provides limited flexibility when it comes to building complex automations that involving multiple systems and complex business logic.
Pricing
Per user plan ($15 per user/month)
Per user plan with attended RPA ($40 per user/month)
Per flow plan (Starting at $500 per month)
Pros
The NICE platform stands out with its ease of implementation. Users deploy simple RPA bots in a couple of clicks with the help of the built-in Click to Automate feature.
Cons
NICE users note its limited range of unattended automation tools, which makes the platform better suited for automating fragmented and small real estate tasks, such as mortgage loan document approval, refund order acceptance, or reporting.
Pricing
Price on request
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RPA implementation guidelines for real estate
Consider the following best practices to maximize the benefits of investing in RPA technology and streamline its adoption across your real estate organization.
Select appropriate use cases
To ensure a fast and consistent ROI, you should identify the most suitable RPA use cases, possibly with proper BPM solutions. We highlighted the link between these two disciplines in our BPM vs RPA analysis. Consider prioritizing repetitive, high volume, and well-structured business processes manageable by RPA bots that will benefit from increased scalability.
Chart 1: Automation opportunities in real estate
Data source: deloitte.com—Corporate Real Estate and Facilities Management in the digital world.
High
Level of value created
Low
High
Level of effort
Low
Secondary candidates for RPA
Manage bidding process for capital projects
Maintain space and occupancy data
Execute cost allocation methodology
Likely candidates for RPA
Manage real estate-related on-boarding activities for new employees
Manage utility payments and track energy consumption
Maintain up-to-date IWMS data
Do not automate
Monitor operational risk and compliance
Perform project
close-out
Develop capital program plan
Secondary candidates for RPA
Assemble and organize performance management data
Manage service requests
Maintain up-to-date customer and vendor data
Set up a comprehensive adoption roadmap
RPA implementation is a complex, multifaceted process encompassing several key phases:
1
Planning
RPA developers identify automation opportunities, evaluate costs and benefits, and design functional and technical aspects of your solution.
2
Configuration
Engineers configure and set up the RPA solution according to your requirements and test it in a dedicated environment to ensure that automation works properly.
3
Deployment
Developers integrate the RPA solution into your workflows, track its performance according to pre-defined KPIs, and fine-tune it to improve a bot’s efficiency, accuracy, and speed.
Define a change management strategy
RPA bots can radically change your corporate workflows and business functions, but companies need to properly lay the groundwork for this transformation. This generally includes proactive communication of the adoption objectives and ongoing training and support to help employees familiarize themselves with the RPA technology. The transformation can also involve several workflow adjustments in light of future interactions with bots to avoid new bottlenecks.
Challenges of RPA in real estate
Similar to predictive analytics technologies in real estate, RPA has immense potential but entails some challenges and should be implemented wisely.
Issue
Solution
Handling exceptions
Handling exceptions
In their "basic" version, RPA bots are limited to effectively managing standardized, rule-based activities and recurring scenarios since they follow pre-established instructions, but they can struggle when facing any exceptions to these rules.
A common trend is to enhance RPA solutions with AI technologies, such as machine learning and computer vision, which is known as intelligent process automation (IPA). Artificial intelligence is becoming a staple of most RPA solutions and platforms for real estate, such as UiPath and Automation Anywhere.
Staff concerns
Staff concerns
When it comes to delegating an increasing number of tasks to RPA bots, a widespread fear among professionals is massive job displacement. One in four (26%) IT leaders responsible for technology decisions in large organizations consider job redundancy for human workers the critical automation challenge, according to Digitate’s 2023 AI and Automation report.
To avoid this negative effect, provide employees with proper retraining focused on improving non-replaceable human skills, such as strategic planning, data-driven decision-making, creativity, and public relations.
Conservative industry mindset
Conservative industry mindset
Compared to other sectors, real estate has traditionally shown a limited propensity for change because interpersonal relationships between agents and customers are still perceived as crucial. According to the National Association of Realtors, 89% of clients buy and sell their homes via real estate agents or brokers. Agents also remain the most used information source for property discovery, followed by tablet and mobile devices.
Reshaping an obsolete corporate culture from the ground up is not a simple task. However, promoting digital literacy through targeted training initiatives and incentives and enticing stakeholders with small-scale, fast achievements will facilitate the shift.
Driving innovation in real estate
Relatively easy deployment and remarkable automation capabilities make RPA an ideal candidate to digitalize a conservative industry like real estate. Even if the real estate industry is a couple of steps behind others in terms of automation, it means that early adopters could benefit more from RPA implementation. Real estate businesses can also gain a competitive edge and get more out of RPA transformation by adopting AI-based tools that provide more advanced automation. If you intend to position your organization among the real estate innovation leaders, consider relying on Itransition's expertise in RPA consulting and development.
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