RealNex, a deal-focused proptech company, recently announced what it referred to as a “major product release” of its RealNex Navigator platform.
The product is aimed at commercial real estate deal making and includes CRM, financial analysis, presentations, marketing, reporting and transaction management
“”This is a massive new release, complete with scores of updates and enhancements that our rapidly growing user community has requested,” CEO Jeffrey Finn said in prepared remarks. “Our eco-system has more than doubled over the past year and with that the new ideas and recommendations for new features has grown exponentially. We are doing our best to keep up with all the great ideas from our discerning clients and I am confident they are going to love this latest generation of RealNex.”
This makes it sound like the new release was a significant effort at catching up. The major change is the move of the CRM capabilities to a cloud delivery format rather than its “legacy desktop solution.” There are pros and cons to each approach, but cloud delivery of software has become a major movement in the overall software industry because of two major factors. One is the greater ease of making changes to software without enduring the complexities of clients with varying company-customized versions trying to move to the latest, often requiring significant hands-on help.
According to the company, “existing users will be systematically migrated to the new framework over the coming months” while “all new deployments will be based on the new CRM cloud foundation.”
The other part is a trend that started in the late 1990s and early 2000s, in which vendors of desktop applications looked for ways to gain annual license revenue, like the old mainframe and minicomputer days, rather than trying to sell upgrades to clients.
The other part of the statement about keeping up with the ideas from clients carries the suggestion that there may also have been requests for alterations, bug reports, and other changes that might have accumulated. Or perhaps it was all new ideas, though dealing with bugs is an inevitable part of using commercial software.
RealNex also mentioned “a greater degree of flexibility and display options for its MPDirect hosted listing engine,” improving SEO, which is a critical consideration to bring in potential customers from web searches.
“Clients can also modify the display with a configurable menu, optionally choosing to display prices, property types and availability. Listing displays have been increased to 500 properties at a time, while users can now modify map background color and determine whether or not to include an Agent Directory.”
There are also data services to help seed the CRM system, including “parcel and base building information, the two most recent sales, ownership, loan profiles including lender, loan amount and maturity date as well as tenant rosters.”