Managing buildings with software to save time and resources
How investor, property developer and asset manager Art-Invest Real Estate oversees maintenance and repairs in 30 hotels with PlanRadar
Art-Invest Real Estate, a leading German investment company, were experiencing operational difficulties in managing maintenance and repairs thanks to a reliance on pen, paper and email.
By implementing PlanRadar within all 30 of their hotels, they successfully streamlined work orders, documented repairs, and enhanced collaboration with contractors. Find out how this innovative solution has boosted efficiency and significantly cut costs for Art-Invest Real Estate.
The problem: coordinating work via email is complicated and time-consuming
Constantin Hoss is responsible for hotel asset management at Art-Invest Real Estate. Together with his team, he manages a portfolio of around 30 buildings. On the commercial side, this includes all activities related to rental and lease agreements. On the technical side, the focus is on maintenance work, ranging from minor repairs to major upgrades. In the course of his work, Constantin Hoss is in active contact with property managers.
In the past, that didn’t always go smoothly. “Emails sometimes disappeared in the daily flood of communications. And if you wanted to know the current status of a job, you first had to sift through all the messages. Sometimes people forgot to save the relevant documents on the drive, so we had to painstakingly search through everything for them,” the asset manager said. The lack of an overview increased the administrative workload. And that cost time.
The solution: managing buildings with software makes processes more efficient
Art-Invest Real Estate has chosen PlanRadar’s building management software to make its maintenance and repair tasks more efficient. After a successful pilot phase in two hotels, Constantin Hoss and his team rolled out the software to the entire hotel portfolio. PlanRadar is used to monitor all maintenance measures for defect management.
Four aspects are key:
1. Communication
- Especially for large city hotels with several hundred rooms, many defects naturally occur over time. All related communication was transferred from emails to PlanRadar and is now done on one platform via pictures, videos, comments and via the chat function.
2. Approvals:
- Snagging, including sourcing quotes and managing external contractors, is partially handled by the operator’s on-site technicians. As the owner, Art-Invest Real Estate pays for a large part of the costs. This means that processes around defects that occur have to be approved by Constantin Hoss and his team via the software. With PlanRadar, approvals are faster due to the rapid exchange of information.
3. Project oversight:
- Using PlanRadar’s easy-to-read dashboard and statistics function, Constantin Hoss can monitor the current status of work in all managed existing hotels.
4. Document storage:
- All the relevant documents for snagging are stored in PlanRadar.
The result: PlanRadar building management software helps to save time and resources
With PlanRadar’s building management software, Constantin Hoss and is team benefit from much more efficient processes: “PlanRadar saves us a lot of email traffic and paperwork. Since all information, including correspondence, is in one place, the processing of defects is faster and it is easier to check the current status. So we save time on administrative work and have more resources for other tasks.” Not only asset managers at Art-Invest Real Estate benefit but hotel operators too. “We get very positive feedback from the hotels regarding PlanRadar. The operators appreciate the shorter processing time, which means that jobs are handled faster. It also helps us that PlanRadar lets you create different roles for users. As a result, operators only see the information that is relevant to them,” says Constantin Hoss.
