April 2, 2009

CASE STUDY FOR: Birch Management Inc.   www.thebirchcompanies.com
LCS creates new web site integrating Rent Manager software
with Birch's rental operations that features unit availability

Background

London Computer Systems Inc. (LCS), based in Cincinnati, OH, was founded in 1982 by current President and Owner, Dave Hegemann. LCS has recently redesigned the Birch Management website integrating some of the features and functionality of Rent Manager.

Birch Management Inc. is a property management company based in Greensboro, NC and manages single family homes, condos, townhomes, duplexes and apartments. Lee Porter, Principal, co-manages their business and worked with LCS' web design team to complete the project.

Discussions began in 2007 with LCS about teaming up on a project to integrate Birch's property management operations into the web site. In late 2008, LCS added additional staff to their development and web teams and a solution was created to complete the project. The new web site was launched in March 2009.

Challenge

In 2008, Birch Management's business was rapidly expanding and they needed to implement new measures to save time for their office staff. According to Lee Porter, the number of time-consuming, manual property updates they were doing on a daily basis needed to be reduced.

"Property updates were eating most of our time because we needed to make changes in pricing or property descriptions in four areas: the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), our web site, our in-house property flier and Craig's List," explains Porter.

Coincidentally, they were also having major problems with their web site hosting/design company and were ready to make a change.

Porter elaborates that, "Other web hosting/design companies were more marketing-focused and didn't understand what we needed. LCS understood our business, because they write the property management software we use, and they had the inside expertise to make it work for us."

Solution

According to LCS' Development Director, Tony Little, there needed to be separate functional areas on their web site for their main business categories: property owners, prospective residents, current residents and unit availability.

"We needed to eliminate their duplicate work," states Little. "So we basically created a bridge that connects their unit inventory and Rent Manager data with their new web site which we also designed and is now hosted by our servers, located here in Cincinnati."

Since Birch Management was already using Rent Manager software to manage properties, it was an ideal solution to integrate their rental property operations with it and then design their web site as the main portal for all aspects of their business. The combination was a winning solution and established a blueprint that can work for nearly any property management company.

Result

The Birch Management site now has a complete new design and pulls information from Rent Manager including unit availability. Their office staff saves times by efficiently processing maintenance requests, rent payments, owner reports and rental applications. Rent Manager's NEW Owner web Access Portal was also utilized and fully integrated so property owners can directly log in to their Birch account for complete control and review of their properties. Residents can also log in to make payments or maintenance requests.

"Now all we have to do for property updates is make changes in two places - in Rent Manager and the MLS," adds Porter. "When it's changed in the Rent Manager database, it automatically changes on our web site too."

To view the Birch Management site, visit www.thebirchcompanies.com.