How Carpediem Homes makes properties more profitable with Jestor

When dealing in the real estate business, sustainable growth must come with tight operations and efficient processes. Carpediem Homes found in Jestor a way to run their services like clockwork with balancing reduced costs with awesome results. 

Numbers

Indirect savings
Carpediem Homes was able to keep their growth pace with the same team, postponing hires and keeping overhead costs low.

Direct savings
by centralizing processes in Jestor, redundant software was cut off and database costs for internal projects were reduced.

About Carpediem Homes

Carpediem Homes specializes in managing vacation properties, keeping their profitability high. This allows property owners to have high rentability on their assets without any of the operational and maintenance hassle, and in turn ensures guests can have a memorable time in high end properties that would otherwise be inaccessible or unavailable for rental.

Fast paced evolution

When starting out, Carpediem Homes could manage their operation with simple tools, such as spreadsheets and kanbans. After all, they had the most important thing when it comes to conquering the market: a lot of know-how and expertise in the workings of their industry.

Quickly, however, they realized that their processes were starting to take shape in ways too complex for those tools to handle. So, in order to keep growing at a fast pace, they decided to exchange Trello for a different kanban tool–Pipe–which allowed them to sustain their operations evolution for a renewed stretch of time. 

The problem is: they soon found themselves outgrowing the software again. 

You could say there were two main problems Carpediem Homes was facing that would soon slam the brakes on what was otherwise an accelerating enterprise:  

1. Pipe couldn’t integrate with the Property Management System they were using, which meant getting reservation and guest information was an entirely manual process. 
2. The lack of good data relationship between processes meant it was hard to actually leverage the data they had. Automations were limited, and the fact that they had to use different software for different processes didn’t help.

While a capable team and tight processes were able to keep them going so far, Carpediem Homes would soon reach a point where things would begin to break down: scaling up headcount while depending solely on manual tasks is a recipe for human error. This, in turn, would severely affect the quality of their services, something they were quite proud of.

They knew they could either:

• Scale up costs and redundancies to try and reduce errors, impacting profitability.
• Try to keep things as they were, impacting quality.

None of those options were good enough for Carpediem Homes, of course, so they started looking for new solutions that could help them keep growing without having to sacrifice core aspects of their operations.

It was in this search that they found a third, better option: Jestor.

Starting from the basics

The first big problem Carpediem Homes solved was the lack of integration between their Property Management System and their actual day-to-day operations software.

Before, they would have to access the platform, export reports and format spreadsheets to get new reservations, then upload this to their kanbans without being able to retain or categorize all their data in the manner they needed or preferred.

When factoring in that reservations could be changed or canceled, the entire process not only took a lot of time, but it was very prone to errors.

With Jestor, this process is effortless and error-proof.

As soon as a reservation is made, all the information is received in Jestor automatically, and properly connected to the relevant records, such as property or guest. Data is categorized and stored correctly: check in/check out dates, payment amounts and status, you name it. 

Not only that, but any further change or update in the Property Management System is also sent to Jestor so that Carpediem Homes can rest assured that, whenever they’re looking at Jestor, they’re looking at the most current information.

With a single integration, the most time consuming part of their operation became as trivial as opening an inbox and seeing what’s new.

Not only that, but it was like Jestor had empowered the very own Property Management System they were using. A lot of things they couldn’t do, or that were only available in different software, they were now able to do–way easier–in Jestor.

TLDR: Carpediem Homes found in Jestor a tool that could be as adaptive as their own team, and that integrated perfectly with their most important tools. 

Making everything better 

After the integration with the Property Management System was done, it was time to move on to the next stage in scaling up their operation: using all of Jestor’s automation capabilities.    

With all the information in Jestor, it was possible to automate a lot of other tasks that were usually performed manually. For example, all the communication regarding the reservation (like the check in and check out processes) was traditionally done via WhatsApp, their client’s favorite method of messaging. So now, as soon as a reservation is created, guests receive custom WhatsApp greeting messages, and then scheduled messages to guide them as their reservation date approaches.

Another thing that really helped their team was communication not with the guests, but with the properties’ staff. Concierges and security staff in the premises receive information automatically to process and grant access to the guests. As each property demands different information, messages have to be customized, something that could take a long time by hand but takes milliseconds when automated.

Finally, Carpediem Homes was able to fully take advantage not only of Jestor’s no-code capabilities, but also a lot of low-code features as well. Automations and integrations that are too customized or complex to be done by hand are easily created through low-code (and much easier to do than if coded by scratch!) Not only that, but they are even able to grant limited views to property owners where they can check up on how their properties are performing, giving them much more visibility than they would have with other competitors.

What lies ahead 

In Carpediem Homes’ opinion, one of the best things about Jestor is how much more dynamic and empowered they are when adapting and creating new things. While they had some specific uses in mind when they migrated to Jestor, they soon found themselves expanding the tool to encompass a lot of other processes and teams than originally planned.

As an example, areas that traditionally use dedicated tools inside companies (such as the finance team) started using Jestor as well, mainly because of how adaptive and powerful it can be so long as they know what they’re trying to achieve. It can even integrate with software that have little to none native integrations with off-the-shelf solutions through easy to use no-code and low-code API integration features.

Not that it’s always needed. A huge advantage of using Jestor is that it decreased the number of integrations needed, solely because it decreased the number of necessary software to run the whole company. Even so, it’s nice to know that any team member is able to start putting ideas to test, even if they don’t have time from the engineering team available.

With this in mind, Carpediem Homes’ plans for the future are pretty clear: they’re going to keep adapting their process to optimize their operations and provide better services ever more efficiently. And, no matter the type of solution they may end up needing, they know Jestor is up to the task. If they know what they want, they can build it with Jestor.