When Steve Demarais had two new shopping centers added to his portfolio, he received the same amount of information he typically got on a new property.
None.
“You usually get absolutely nothing,” said Demarais, a senior regional property manager with Phillips Edison & Company. “And it takes so much time to go through a property to truly learn and understand it. There are always little things you don’t know.”
For Demarais, who manages 14 properties across Arizona and Nevada, that meant a lot of guesswork, along with lost time and money.
“If we had an issue with, say, an underground water line leaking, we had to go out there and try to find where the leak was coming from,” he said. “I’d have to get a plumber or go out there myself and turn things on and off to find the source of the problem.”
Demarais knew there was a better way to handle situations like these, and that the solution was ID Plans. He’d heard about their property management software for years. He was pleased to learn his two new properties were going to have comprehensive site plans created on them.
Using Remote Property Manager to Survey Shopping Centers
Once the paperwork was signed, ID Plans quickly deployed its team of experts to survey and gather all the details of each of Demarais’s new properties. That data was then mapped, coded, and put into a cloud-based application. Therefore, Demarais and his team could now access the information from anywhere, at any time, on any device.
With the Remote Property Manager (RPM) from ID Plans, Demarais had a true “owner’s manual” for his properties. RPM would provide all the information he needed to know to run them more efficiently. Now, the water leak scenario – and others like it – could be handled more quickly.
“With ID Plans, we can trace where the line goes and detect the problem from there,” he said. “Now we don’t have to guess.”
Knowing the exact location of a problem represents considerable cost savings when it comes to hiring vendors, he said.
“If I need a landscaper to do work, I can send out the information on where they need to go,” he said. “We’re not paying $130 an hour for them to spend time looking for the problems.”
Overall, Demarais is thrilled with the volume of data he now has on his properties, and that the information is easy to share with vendors and other members of his team.
“It’s great to have all this information right at hand,” he said. “I’m hoping we do RPMs for the rest of my portfolio.”
To learn more about Remote Property Manager and ID Plans, please
contact us today to schedule a demo. 
