Property Management System

06 September 2009, 3:09pm

Bringing practicality and efficient working to the market place, Aligned Assets are soon to release their new Property Management System. Building on their expertise in address management for local government, Symphony PMS is designed to allow for the complete management of an authority’s property portfolio. It will help to achieve the efficiencies expected by central government by enabling the better delivery of services to the public through better property management. Interested parties are welcome to the official launch in Cardiff on 18th September.

New GIS enabled Property Management System Extended News

Property is the blood of business, and many different organisations hold and manage large property portfolios.

Local government will be responsible for an extensive range of property, ranging from schools, leisure centres, social housing and parks, through to investment properties such as shops and industrial estates – even pubs.

The Emergency Services will likewise have varied portfolios to manage, which will include properties such as residential accommodation, training facilities and operational assets, all the way through to examination suites.

In the commercial sector, organisations involved in property management will naturally focus more on investment property, but economic viability will often require a diverse portfolio, which brings with it differing management requirements.

To aid all three sectors, gazetteer specialists Aligned Assets have created the Symphony Property Management System (PMS), designed to aid the purchase, sales, maintenance and legalities involved in managing all these differing portfolios.

The system, which was developed in partnership with Cardiff Council, stores information about the property and has case management workflow capability for handling acquisition, disposals, rent reviews and lease tenancy grants. It also enables managed properties to be surveyed for things like asbestos, fire risk assessments, etc. and enables people to access survey reports from across an organisation via their intranet.

One of the key principles of Symphony PMS is that it has been built with the concepts of t-government very much in mind and the efficiency savings that the concepts were designed to achieve. Speaking of this, Phil Gee, Commercial Director at Aligned Assets explained the rationale:

“One of the key advantages our gazetteer solutions have always had is an emphasis on centralising the use of National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG) address data, whether through web services or the synchronisation of third party systems.

“It has always proved inefficient to have disparate systems all containing address data that requires different people to manage them, which not only is a complete waste of manpower, but can lead to errors with different departments referencing different addresses. We carried this principle of efficiency with us in the build of Symphony PMS.”

What truly sets Symphony PMS apart from all other property management systems on the market is how it ‘pulls’ addresses directly from NLPG data, either a local authority’s Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG) or the internally held copies of the NLPG in the case of the Emergency Services or Commercial Organisations.

In doing so, there is an automatic correlation of property information from one system to the next due to the use of Unique Property Reference Numbers (UPRNs) in the NLPG. Not only this, but by pulling the data from the NLPG, means that address data will not require updating in Symphony PMS as changes will automatically be reflected when called from the source gazetteer.

Symphony PMS enables the full, complete management of:

· Properties - includes the ability to store documents, valuation history and record other key property attributes

· Cases - the ability to record and approve authorisations, record interested parties, associated documents and manage case workflow

· Tenancies - tenancy type, duration, review date and rent history

· Tenants - Tenant ID, organisation, name and full contact details

· Contact List - allows for the full management of contact details from tenants through to contractors

· Maps - integrates with your choice of GIS application

Phil Gee went onto say, “Symphony PMS is packed full of functionality and is fully BS7666 compliant. Although it sounds like it should be common sense, a problem with a lot of software packages is that they are great at holding data, but fail when it comes to giving the user access to it.

“To ensure that users of Symphony PMS will always have easy access to the data they require, not only do we allow them to drill down through property data in a visual fashion, but we also supply an advanced ‘Google-type’ search engine enabling a user to rapidly home in on information of relevance.”

Symphony PMS is now available to all industry sectors and to celebrate the official launch of the completed solution, Aligned Assets will be holding a launch party at Cardiff Council on 18th September 2009.

They would like to extend an invitation to anyone with an interest in property management to join them for a glass of champagne and a celebration of what is set to become their most significant product release since the Symphony Gazetteer Management System.

For more information email: carl.hancock@aligned-assets.co.uk or call 0870 750 8750.

www.aligned-assets.co.uk