Marcus Dodd
Head of Property Management, Chandler Garvey
Chandler Garvey is one of the leading firms of commercial property consultants in the Thames Valley, with a network of five offices in Buckinghamshire and Berkshire.
Marcus Dodd, heads up the property management arm of the business and has been leveraging technology to streamline processes and ultimately deliver greater value to clients and the business. Marcus was a graduate surveyor at Chandler Garvey and re-joined the team in 2019, after working at CBRE and Savills.
When Marcus stepped into his role at Chandler Garvey, he was eager to bring on a solution that would provide immediate insight into their operations, from one central platform.
"The world has become accustomed to having information instantly available. However, we have been dealing with older style property management software that is less intuitive and accessible only through a local server,” says Marcus.
Clients would enquire as to how much of the service charge budget we had remaining for the year, and I would have to spend time looking through different reports to confirm the current position.
Not only was this a time-consuming process, manipulating data to get answers to basic queries, but it was also impacting the level of service Chandler Garvey could provide their clients.
For Marcus and his team, it was paramount that they moved to a new system that would provide clear and easily-accessible information, and allow them to focus on value-add activities.
Chandler Garvey decided to move their operations on to the cloud after experiencing the power of the cloud with their new accounting software, Xero. This presented the perfect opportunity to introduce a modern, cloud-based property management system.
We wanted everything we were using to be cloud based and that's why Re-Leased appealed to us. You can access it anywhere; you just need a computer or a smartphone.”
Having struggled with an outdated and cumbersome system before, Chandler Garvey knew a good user experience would be another one of their key solution requirements.
"The software seems complicated in what it can do, but it’s built in such a way that it’s quite simple to operate. It's easy to get all those different pieces of information which we couldn’t get before.”
“I tell people that Re-Leased is more like Windows 10, whereas what we had before was Windows 95.”
Alongside Re-leased and Xero, the company are also using iAuditor, Tripcatcher, Receipt Bank, HubSpot CRM and Bright HR.
As Chandler Garvey gets up and running on the Re-Leased platform, their first priority has been to get a clear understanding of business performance, as well as automating tasks, such as notifying tenants and tracking payments and arrears.
"I like having a single point of truth that shows you what your workload looks like and tells you what’s due."
I look forward to knowing exactly how we are tracking and having visibility of all tasks and upcoming events. This will give us the freedom to focus on our property inspections and risk assessments, without something else getting thrown in the mix. Re-Leased will help us remove chaos and add structure and order.”
Marcus is looking forward to working with a complete picture of his property management department, especially as he looks to bring more properties into the portfolio. Marcus is also confident the client accounting functions will help their accounts team save administrative time thanks to the automatic transaction matching, reconciliation and disbursement runs. Perhaps most importantly, this all combines to create a service experience that is quickly becoming a competitive advantage for the company.