What media breaks cause in the letting process of large housing portfolios – and what they cost.
Short answer: media breaks occur when property data sits in the ERP, listings on portals, applications in the inbox, viewings in the calendar and contracts on paper or in a separate signature tool. Every hand-over costs time and creates errors. The solution is a letting platform that maps every step in one system and exchanges data with the ERP only at the start and the end.
Seven typical break points
- ERP → listing. Property data is re-entered for every portal; floor areas and rents drift apart.
- Portal → inbox. Applications arrive by email; matching them to property and applicant is manual work. Bots and duplicate profiles go unnoticed.
- Inbox → pre-selection. Assessment happens in Excel or in someone’s head; compliance with the AGG (German General Equal Treatment Act) is not documented.
- Pre-selection → viewing. Appointments by phone, cancellations by email, reminders not at all.
- Viewing → supporting documents. Tenant self-disclosure form, credit check and housing entitlement certificate (Wohnberechtigungsschein, WBS) are requested, checked and filed – three times over.
- Acceptance → contract. Data is transferred into a contract template; signature on paper or in a third-party tool.
- Contract → ERP and tenant portal. The tenant is created from scratch; their applicant account disappears and the tenant account starts at zero.
What this costs: cost-to-lease
For each re-letting, add up the staff hours across all seven hand-overs plus the vacancy days caused by waiting times between the steps. In portfolios of 5,000 units or more with 6–8% turnover, this adds up to several hundred cases a year – at 4–6 hours of manual work per case, that quickly amounts to a full-time position, before vacancy is even counted. The ROI calculator does this calculation for your portfolio.
Why a second system does not multiply the breaks but closes them
The reflex of many IT departments is understandable: no more tools. What matters, however, is not the number of systems but the number of hand-overs. A letting platform that runs steps 1–7 in one data model has exactly two interfaces to the ERP: property data in, tenancy agreement and tenant data back. Seven breaks become two defined hand-overs – and the ERP remains the leading system for master data and accounting.
Checklist for your next process review
- Where is the same information entered twice today?
- Where does an application sit unprocessed for more than 24 hours?
- Which documents do you check manually, even though a platform would be allowed to pre-check them?
- How many applications per listing come from bots or duplicate profiles?
- How many days pass between acceptance and signed contract?
Read on: How housing companies digitalise their letting process sustainably · ERP integrations at Immomio
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