How can the property industry use Airwallex?

The real estate industry is fiercely competitive, and if you’re a growth-oriented property business, taking a good hard look at every facet of your operations is crucial.

Not every financial operations tool can be tailored to the unique needs of this fast-moving industry. But Airwallex’s advanced – but easy-to-use – features can be a perfect fit for real estate, property management and strata agencies looking to boost their operational performance. 

Trends and transformations in the property industry

Pandemic recovery, cost of living pressures and high inflation have had an equal (and sometimes greater) impact on property as on other industries, despite a famously booming market. 

A recent survey of real estate industry leaders shows that getting profit margins back into healthy territory is their biggest focus for the coming years. But in this unique business space, where transactions are often life-changing events for those involved, the approach needs to be carefully thought out. 

The right tools can reduce administrative burdens and bring what really matters into focus: creating strong connections with customers. 

The move towards low-touch or no-touch interactions has also revolutionised the real estate business model. Once a field dominated by paper and in-person interactions, it’s now adopting online processes for inspections, auctions, leasing applications and more, reshaping workflows and introducing new tools to adapt. 

This digital overhaul presents a prime opportunity for agencies to leverage technology across their operations – to boost efficiency, slash operational costs and enhance their brand. 

Creating back office efficiencies through automation

From data entry to approval, manual invoice processing is a notorious time sink for a range of property businesses. The amount of work that property managers do to reconcile invoices for routine repairs and maintenance alone takes up countless precious hours that could be better spent on other business-building and customer-facing tasks. 

The scenario is similar for real estate agents that use manual invoice and bill pay processes. These create bottlenecks that can slow down the payment cycle and impact business relationships and credit terms. 

Without the checks and balances included in automated systems, there’s also a higher risk of error rates, fraud and non-compliance. From typos to missed payments, these can lead to mistakes that are difficult to put right and can result in late payment fees, soured supplier relationships and a compromised credit rating.

Crucially, as transaction volumes increase, manual systems become unsustainable and can lead to businesses hitting an operational ceiling, limiting their potential for expansion.

Free your finance team from manual, time-consuming bill payments

With Airwallex, you can automate invoice capture, approval and payment in an intuitive tool that integrates with your existing accounting solution. There are a range of benefits available to your accounts team.

Bill Pay lets you:

• Eliminate manual data entry by uploading or emailing bills. 

• Automatically extract all relevant data using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, saving you time and reducing the risk of error.

• Create multi-layer approval workflows across specific roles to stay in line with company spending policies.

• Get regular notifications when bills are awaiting approval or payment.

Saving time and money by streamlining expense management

Whether it's parking and petrol costs, photographers and printers, staging and decorating, or the cost of entertaining and buying gifts for clients, cards can be a convenient way to handle the collection of expenses that go into running a real estate business. 

The reality is, however, that SMEs are often saddled with card transaction fees up to three times higher than big businesses because of their limited bargaining power. 

Not only is it tricky to find a cost-effective card option for team expenses but the process of applying for and receiving cards is cumbersome and time-consuming.

There’s also the concern that using shared corporate cards is inefficient and open to misuse. And, of course, reconciling out-of-pocket expenses that constantly crop up is annoying both for agents and the accounting team.

Ease the pain with a hassle-free business credit card alternative

With Airwallex, you can create employee and company cards instantly and stay in control of all team transactions from a single dashboard that updates in real time. You can:

• Create custom approval workflows.

• Eliminate the burden of manual reimbursements. 

• Set spending limits and controls, and instantly create, freeze or cancel cards if necessary. 

• Always have a complete real-time view of card activity at your fingertips.

Add value with smart integrations

​​Dealing with a tech ecosystem where software and apps don't integrate smoothly can lead to a domino effect where everyone's job becomes harder than it needs to be.

It increases the risk of errors and can also lead to information silos locking essential data within specific applications, making it difficult to have a comprehensive view of operations or to make informed decisions. As staff find themselves bogged down by repetitive tasks that could have been automated, team morale can suffer.

Build a tech stack that works for you

It’s important to feel confident that any new solution or app you introduce will fit in well with the rest of your agency's technology ecosystem.

Airwallex allows you to access a comprehensive suite of integrations that allow your agency to significantly increase its performance and productivity.

If you use software like Xero or QuickBooks, for example, you can have a much more powerful and flexible accounting solution when you pair it with Airwallex. You can:

• Speed up the collection process by embedding payment links into invoices, making it more convenient customers to pay.

• Automate reconciliation by creating bank feeds to auto-sync transactions into accounting software.

• Manage expenses more efficiently by importing charts of accounts, and tracking categories and tax rates to code expenses directly within Airwallex.

A new lease on financial operations

You can streamline your accounts payable, create employee and company cards, integrate with your favourite accounting software and so much more when you sign up for a free Airwallex account.

Disclaimer: This information doesn’t take into account your objectives, financial situation, or needs. If you are a customer of Airwallex Pty Ltd (AFSL No. 487221) it is important for you to read the Product Disclosure Statement (PDS) for the Direct Services, which is available here.