"We have processes in place to manage everything and the time spent on the ongoing management of the properties is kept low"

OpticRealm Ltd. is a property development company and corporate Landlord. They have been in the industry for nearly thirty years and are based in London.

Why did your company pick Arthur?

It was clear that we needed a software to help us manage our constantly growing portfolio of properties. We were using Xero for accounting, but everything else was paper and spreadsheets. Having reviewed several different software providers and received demonstrations of them, Arthur’s solution seemed to suit our needs the best. We could also see Arthur continuing to work for us as we grew.

What were your largest operational challenges before moving to Arthur? How has Arthur helped you to overcome them?

Before we moved to Arthur, we had lots of different systems doing individual parts of our process. This led us to having information saved in different places and constant lost time trying to find things, cross checking between systems and in general just slowing us down.

Arthur means we can keep all our operational information in once place. We can now store all our financial information in Arthur, which is linked to Xero, and it’s in the same place as all of our technical and communication records with tenants. It’s made life much easier.

What features in Arthur have you found most useful?

We use a lot of the system, but there are a few areas we have found really useful. The maintenance reporting area that the tenants are able to use through their app has stopped countless emails, text messages and phone calls; health and safety compliance tracking through Arthur has stopped the need for calendar reminders and a spreadsheet to track them and just in general using the software to track tenancy details. – like being able to see start and end dates, break clauses, a full history of payments and more at the touch of a button is really useful.

How did you find the onboarding process?

In all honesty, we struggled a bit with the system at first – we were not used to having a software. We made the decision to get some training on the system and a couple of Arthur’s team came to our office for a day. After that, we spent more time on it, understood what we were doing, got up to speed with the day to day activities and everything was fine.

What do you think of Arthur’s customer support?

As we have a relationship manager that knows our setup, we tend to go direct to them with any questions we have. There is a live chat too, but we rarely use it as our relationship manager is better placed to answer our queries. We have come to rely less and less on the Arthur team as we have become experts in the software ourselves.

How much has your business grown since you started using Arthur? Has Arthur helped?

We started using Arthur over two years ago, since then we’re about 50% bigger. Arthur has made it much easier to add new properties and tenancies to our portfolio by ensuring we have processes in place to manage everything and the time spent on the ongoing management of the properties is kept low.

How much time and/or money has using Arthur saved you and your team?

It’s difficult to say how much time or money Arthur has saved us, but we have scaled the portfolio by 50% without having to take on anymore team members.