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Thursday 27 October 2011
OM Property Management named most innovative in industry
Picture from left to right: Ben Pacy - Group E Business Manager, Adam Cooper - Managing Director OM, Christopher Attwater - Regional Property Manager OM & Sarah Norgate - Online Systems Developer
ARMA, the Association of Residential Managing Agents, has awarded OM Property Management the prestigious ARMA Innovation Award 2011 for its ‘Maintenance Updates’ service for customers. This exciting new offering sits within their customer website called – ‘Your Property Online’.
Awarding the gong on 5 October, judges singled out the way the new Maintenance Updates on the website create a vital information link between OM Property Management’s customers, its property managers and customer service staff, and its contractors.
For the residents at OM Property Management’s developments, the ‘Maintenance Updates’ pages on ‘Your Property Online’ provide an online view of current maintenance work at each development. It also provides a history of all work undertaken to date – and gives residents a chance to feedback on completed jobs.
In OM Property Management’s Open Market Survey of private leasehold owners last month. 68% said the idea of being informed about maintenance work schedules and rating contractor performance online was appealing.
Contractors benefit from having access to an online conduit for updating property managers and residents on works in progress. This streamlines the process of responding to individual phone calls from residents and property management staff. Because the website has been built for both desktop and mobile internet browsers, updates can be posted via smartphones while contractors are actually on site.
The system also links into OM Property Management’s customer services team, meaning that residents who choose to call for updates will have access to the same real-time information they would have if they went online.
Adam Cooper, OM Property Management’s Managing Director and creator of this new service, comments, “When the e-business team sat down to develop the next stage of ‘Your Property Online’, real-time maintenance updates had seemed like a natural progression.
The feedback we had when we trialled the service was overwhelmingly positive. The fact it is now intended to be rolled out, not only across our entire portfolio, but those of our sister companies too, means the project has already been a massive success for us,” he said.
“We were lucky enough to have already won the RICS Award for Property Management Strategy and Delivery – Private Sector in 2007, so to now win ARMA’s Innovation Award is fantastic and helps drive the team on to deliver more customer focused web solutions !”
David Salusbury, chairman of the National Landlords Association and ARMA Innovation Award judge, said, “Like most good ideas, this looks like an obvious solution to what must be an almost intractable problem of keeping hundreds of clients, stakeholders and users informed and up to date about potentially thousands of activities. The scale of the undertaking looks enormous and the narrative provided shows how extensive the planning and execution of the project has had to be to ensure its success. Full marks to OM Property Management for this trail-blazing innovative idea and full marks to them for making it work.”
