CUSTOM BLEND Of course the question of whether to build or buy software often comes down to whether or not an off-the-shelf product can do what a business needs, from routine work to custom processes. “It’s the classic strategic decision within IT,” says Patrick Gray, president of Prevoyance Group, an IT consulting company based in Harrison, N.Y. “Building offers the ultimate in customization, but at a higher cost. On the other hand, package software is growing increasingly more flexible, but still expects some level of adapting your processes to the software.”
After initially looking into developing a custom program itself, the Athena Group, a New York-based developer and operator of approximately 4,500 units on the East and West coasts, decided to implement a packaged solution instead. It chose Chicago-based Sonoma Partners’ CRM Elements for Real Estate to help manage concessions offered by its sales force. “We’re a small organization, relatively speaking,” says Harold Willig, the firm’s controller. “It really came down to how much could we allocate to designing and working on something ourselves. It was going to be a tremendous investment to design our own application.”
But the firm was concerned about how tailored Sonoma’s solution, which was written as an add-onto Microsoft’s customer relationship management software, would be. Working with Sonoma, Willig says Athena was able to dictate specific fields in the program, which has enabled the firm to achieve 100 percent compliance on concessions. “We were able to customize it, and we continue to customize it, just like we would have if we developed something ourselves,” Willig says. “But here, we didn’t have to start from scratch.”
At Lincoln Property Company in Dallas, a third-party fee manager that oversees 112,000 units, director of information technology Brian Galla says the firm has developed a number of in-house solutions, but that they usually work in tandem with commercially available packages. He cites Lincoln’s intranet system, which is designed to work in conjunction with property management software from Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Yardi Systems. Beyond that type of specific customization, though, he says the options available on the market today are hard to ignore.
“If you’re looking at a resident portal, for instance, 90 percent of it is going to be the same no matter who the management company or ownership entity is,” Galla says. “There might be a small percentage of functionality where you go in and customize it, but at that stage, you’re really talking about point solutions. That’s what we’ve done.”
Joe Bousquin is a freelance writer in Newcastle, Calif.
ACTION ITEMS HOW TO DECIDE WHETHER TO BUILD OR BUY NEEDED TECHNOLOGY
- Only build what you have to. In-house development is expensive. There are a myriad of off-the-shelf packages today specifically tailored to the multifamily industry. “If you can buy it, buy it,” says Patrick Gregory, IT director at United Dominion Realty Trust.
- If off-the-shelf packages don’t offer exactly what you want, work with the vendor to add custom features.
- In-house add-ons can help with internal operations, such as designing an intranet to work in conjunction with a commercially developed property management system.
