How Alarca Realty Replaced Spreadsheets with Process Street to Streamline Property Management

Alarca Realty is a property management firm based in Charlotte, North Carolina, specializing in the full-service management of family homes, condominiums, townhouses, duplexes, and small multi-family developments.

We spoke with owner and CEO Bob Abbott to discuss how Alarca uses Process Street to improve the management and execution of property management workflows that keep their growing business running smoothly.

Streamline property management yourself with Process Street

Before we jump into Alarca’s story, check out the webinar video below. It’s a great resource for learning about how you can use Process Street to bolster your property management-related workflows, just like Alarca!

The Alarca Story

Founded in 2005, Alarca began with the mission of delivering world-class property management services in Charlotte and other locations in southwestern North Carolina.

Their focus on customer service and providing the highest return for clients has resulted in them achieving industry-leading client retention levels.

For many years, the company used a large library of spreadsheets to manage internal processes and track communication with clients.

As the company grew, so did their spreadsheets, and it soon became incredibly difficult and time-consuming to execute tasks as efficiently as they would like.

Bob identified this bottleneck, and after a period of significant research and testing, decided to go with Process Street to improve the way his team complete their day-to-day tasks and for him, as the manager, to gain greater insight into the progress of workflows.

Alarca Realty uses Process Street for:

• End-to-end execution of move-ins and move-outs
• Listing new properties
• Coordinating maintenance work
• Renewing contracts
• Handling tenant evictions
• Onboarding new employees
• Daily/weekly/monthly recurring tasks (e.g. checking work orders)
• Tracking which employees are doing which tasks in real-time

They’ve benefited from implementing Process Street by:

• Significantly reducing human error
• Streamlining team communication
• Establishing an easy way to monitor performance across the whole team
• Building a culture of accountability
• Freeing up management time to focus on strategic goals
• No longer requiring multiple spreadsheets to manage tasks

Challenge

Before they began managing their workflows in Process Street, Bob and his team relied on a library of spreadsheets that became increasingly difficult to manage as the company grew across southwestern North Carolina.

The two most significant challenges Alarca Realty faced during this period were:

1. Inability to provide employees with an actionable, centralized resource for effective execution of tasks.
2. The difficulty, from a managerial perspective, in efficiently tracking employee performance and workflow progress on a daily basis.

Bob knew that in order to overcome these challenges, he needed a tool that was more elegant than spreadsheets and had a much wider feature set that could provide him and his team with the resources they need to scale the company without sacrificing productivity.

Enhancing performance with Process Street

As I mentioned earlier, Bob made sure to do his research and test a number of different tools before deciding to go with Process Street.

One of the primary reasons for his decision was the template overview feature, which is a fantastic way to see a summary of every checklist run from a particular template to keep track of your business. This unique feature of Process Street enables managers to quickly see important information including which tasks have been completed for each checklist, creation dates, due dates, form field data, and more.

Aside from the template overview feature, his team is making full use of the wide range of features they have at their disposal.

According to Bob, their favorite features are:

• Inbox
• Stop tasks
• Conditional logic
• Dynamic due dates

“All of those features, we’ve embraced them full force. They’ve just made everything much better. For example, with Inbox, each user can go to one place and see all the tasks they have due without having to open up 17 spreadsheets”

Employees are also able to communicate and collaborate with each other while working through processes, so if there is a particular task that requires the involvement of a colleague, there is no delay in notifying them and providing access to the resources they need to get the job done.

“All of the communication is happening within Process Street. So, you know, if a team member comes across a problem in a process, they simply add a comment in the Process Street checklist as opposed to going into Gmail or Slack, or using another tool”

His team has also greatly benefited from the ability to create complex workflows without making them confusing or difficult to follow. This is in large part thanks to the fact that each task can include various details such as sub-tasks and other form fields that keep the checklist compact and elegant while including rich information.

Results

According to Bob, the reduction in human error due to creating formal, structured processes and the ability to monitor them in real-time has been tremendous and is having a noticeable impact on productivity.

Each team member has a scorecard that they must report on every week, and any overdue tasks in Process Street need to be justified, along with an action plan to get them done as soon as possible.

“When someone asks me a question, they know I’m going to say, “What does Process Street say?”

In addition to higher levels of productivity, having a centralized tool to manage property management workflows end-to-end has resulted in greater collaboration between employees and, ultimately, better service for their clients.

Since integrating Process Street, Alarca Realty has noticed such a significant increase in performance that Bob cannot imagine what his team would do without it.

“My entire team is remote, we all work from home, and so checklists are really how we run our business”

Looking ahead to long-term growth

It’s an exciting time for Alarca Realty. The number of properties they manage is increasing at a faster rate than ever and with an integrated set of software tools including Process Street for workflow management, the team is able to scale without sacrificing performance and customer service.

Another exciting opportunity for Bob and his team is to work alongside other property management firms that use Process Street, so they can optimize processes and grow together in their respective locations.

“Now that some of my fellow property managers are also using Process Street, we’re able to share checklists, which certainly saves time and money, because they can just add me as a guest onto their checklist and we can collaborate which also helps us improve the checklist.”

In conclusion, the future is bright for Alarca Realty. Bob continues to work closely with the team here at Process Street to make sure his team is getting the most out of our product and is excited to capture new growth opportunities in the years to come.

Are you a property manager in need of some checklists to improve your team’s performance? Check out these 9 free property management checklists!