FRIS is a full-service real estate organisation, a family company, which started in 1923. Third generation of FRIS, provides all sorts of real estate services, but with a focus on property management. In addition, FRIS also does residential real estate, commercial real estate, insurance, research and appraisals. The most people within FRIS, a total of 90 people, work in the property management division of real estate.
We caught up with Marc Poelmann, Managing Director of FRIS Real People to talk about FRIS and about how they manage their business and their vision on both the profession and the craft of managing real estate, as well as technology.
“Technology plays very important role for us. The last 10 years we have invested a lot in technology, and you can see that our activities and processes have changed drastically thanks to technology. If I look back 20 years ago within our company, our management department, the administration, in terms of FTE’s, was the biggest department because of all the invoices and service charges that were processed by the department, like in the old days. Nowadays it is one of the smaller departments because we mostly have automated the processes and now the technology department is the biggest division. Therefore, we can spend more time on the buildings and tenants, and that is what the tenants and the clients are noticing,” commented Marc Poelmann.
Poelmann expressed that that the processes are mostly optimised. That also means that the vision on your own processes changed to really focus on the outside world. That are clients, but also tenants “Exactly, so thanks to improving the efficiency of the administrative processes by automating, we can now focus more on the outside to visit the tenants and the buildings, and that is exactly what we want, because that’s what makes the tenants happy”.
Poelmann also commented that CommercialCafe” which is accessable 24/7 by logging into the platform, tenants are able to see their tenant contract, service costs charges, correspondence, and they can also see the status of their maintenance requests., “In the past, they had to call the office and hope they had the right person on the phone, and today they can see it in real time, which is really convenient for our tenants.”
Poelmann explained they bring teams together. “We always say about Yardi that we use a platform that gives us the possibility to work together, and not only for the colleagues here at FRIS Real People, but also for external use such as clients and suppliers, that can connect through that same platform.”
As well as explaining on what the most service oriented real estate service company of The Netherlands means , Poelmann also detailed what role technology plays to achieve this and how to stay on this level.