How housing companies digitalise their entire letting process sustainably.

Many digitalisation projects in the housing industry start with a form on the website and end with an email inbox full of applications. That is digital – but not sustainable. Sustainable means: the process stays stable even with 5,000 applications a month, during an ERP migration and under bot attacks. That takes five building blocks.

1. Marketing from a single source

A listing is maintained once and pushed via multiposting to 40+ portals, your own website and – new – a bot-protected property portal. Property data comes from the ERP, not from a second Excel list. KPI: time-to-publish.

2. Pre-qualification with matching – GDPR- and AGG-compliant

Applicants create a search profile and are pre-selected anonymously by objective criteria before the viewing. A pool of millions of prospective tenants supplies candidates before the listing goes live. KPI: applicant quality (share of invited applicants who turn up to the viewing).

3. Bot protection and verified profiles

In 2026 there are 21 providers of application bots – a year ago there were none. An email address is no longer good enough as an identity. Sustainable processes show properties only to registered profiles, check every application for automation and tie each profile to a phone number. For subsidised housing, there is also the check of the housing entitlement certificate (Wohnberechtigungsschein, WBS) – which a landlord may only carry out after the viewing, but an independent platform with its own terms of use may already carry out in the search profile.

4. Digital signature without media breaks

The contract is generated from the data already in the system: applicant, property, terms. Signature, attachments and handover report run in the same tool, and the completed contract goes back to the ERP via an interface. KPI: time from acceptance to signature.

5. Tenant portal as the continuation

After moving in, the applicant does not switch systems: damage reports, documents, consumption information and messenger continue in the same account. This reduces queries and turns a letting transaction into a relationship.

The order is no coincidence

Start with marketing and pre-qualification – that is where the pressure is greatest and the effect can be measured fastest. Signature and tenant portal follow once the flow of applicants is clean. If you start the other way round, you digitalise the end of a process whose beginning still sits in the inbox.

Three KPIs that carry the business case

• Vacancy days per re-letting
• Time per letting in staff hours
• Cost-to-lease – total cost per signed tenancy agreement

If you measure these three figures before the project, you can prove after six months what digitalisation has achieved – and you do not need a discount discussion when the ERP vendor offers a bundle.