Product Review - RealmCash

What's the most tedious, repetitive, time-consuming and mind-numbing task that a property manager has to deal with? If collecting rents and paying invoices--and all the paperwork that goes along with that--leaps to your mind, you've been there, done that.

True, computers have updated these tasks somewhat. But even today there must be a person behind that computer keyboard who accepts the rent check, enters it into the computer system, locates and fills out the deposit ticket and races to the bank with it each day before closing time.

Or consider the hundreds of invoices that pour into a typical office complex each month from cleaners, painters, plumbers, utilities. Someone has to open the envelopes; look at the invoice; match it up against the accounting system; and get it through the internal approvals process, which may mean handing the paper over to the regional manager or Emailing it to him for sign-off). Once the approval is completed and the invoice returned, a check is cut and all the paperwork is filed away--somewhere in rows of files taking up space against a wall.

But now, a New York City company called the Realm claims all that paperwork and filing and racing to the bank is a thing of the past. The Realm claims it has come up with a way to outsource those tasks via the Internet. It's called RealmCash, and it's subdivided into RealmCollect and RealmPay, both of which aim to whisk away the two most aggravating headaches in a property manager's life. Here's how the RealmCollect system works:

Rent payments, whether made by credit card, check or money order, are sent to a central processing center (in the Northeast, it's in Glen Cove, NY). There they are scanned via a transport--a piece of equipment that can read 500 checks a minute. Once scanned, the data on the checks is electronically published instantly into the client's account online and the checks are deposited to the client's various banks.

The property manager has instant access to this real-time rent data by logging on to RealmCash online and pulling up the information. He can see the image on his screen of the actual rent check, front and back, including signatures and the handwritten amount, as well as the envelope it arrived in. He can also see how much cash has come in through during the course of the day, the month or the year.

The property manager also has available on screen a stream of cash-management data. For example, a large company with properties located nationwide can access RealmCollect and see where it stands across all its properties on a real-time basis.

"Take a hypothetical company, ABC Management, which, let's say, has 100 properties," says Glenn P. Murray, vice president of E-Business. "We access the on-screen account of ABC and see that it has collected $30,000 so far today for all its properties, $540,000 month-to-date since the beginning of the month; and $3.3 million since the beginning of the year. We can see the information by bank--how much went into each bank--as well as by each property. We can also see the information by groups: the East Coast group, West Coast group. We can drill down on a particular property and see that we got seven payments today. We can click on one of the payments, and the screen will show us the envelope, a coupon and a check--the front and back of the check and the rent bill. If we want to, we can zoom in and see the details of that check. We can even do a search to find old checks, or we can single out a specific tenant and see how much they've paid over the past 123 months. It's all here on line."

For RealmPay, the process is similar with a few slightly different steps: The vendors are asked to send their bills directly to the processing center, a P.O. box number. The invoices are scanned at 500 a minute and published electronically into the client's accounts payable system online.

The property manager logs on to RealmPay, where he can see a color scan of an actual invoice--from, say, ConEdison--and notes that it needs to be approved by the regional manager at headquarters in California. Previously, he would have had to Fed Ex the invoice to California, have the manager sign off on it and send it back. Reportedly, with RealmPay, "the file can move around the country automatically without having to send any paper around," notes Murray. Once the invoice is approved on line by the manager, the client can cut a check to the vendor.

The Realm, formed two years ago from a roll-up of five real estate software companies (Argus, B.J. Murray, CTI Limited, Dyna and New Star Solutions) developed RealmCash nine months ago in response to a felt need, says Murray. The process can cut the cost of collections and payables by as much as 30% compared to the paper process, he claims. Clients such as Charles H. Greenthal, CB Richard Ellis, Rockefeller Group and Southern Management have already jumped on board, giving some credence to the idea that this was a "felt need."

This reporter found the RealmCash concept innovative, the work/time savings substantial and the accumulation of information online easy to access and extremely useful for management decisions. The on-screen view of the actual checks and invoices, especially when drilled down to the smallest detail, was impressive.

The question we had about the system was: Why do RealmPay clients still cut their own checks to pay their vendors? Why isn't that function incorporated into RealmCash to make it a truly paperless service? At the moment, says Phillip J. Evanski, executive vice president of product development, RealmCash does not offer the bill-paying service for security reasons and because the average property owner still wishes to control the traditional check-writing part of bill payment.

However, paying vendors automatically is on the horizon. "We're the bridge between today and tomorrow," states Murray. "We're automating as much of the process as we can today. Over time, we'll eliminate paper altogether." It's simply a matter of acceptance by clients and security technology coming together, he says.

The future is already in the works: In the Realm's hopper is a handy little gadget called the RealmReader that converts rent payments from paper to electronic. It works like the machine you swipe your credit card through in a department store: A rent check or credit card is swiped through this machine, the check's image is captured and the rent payment is electronically deposited into the bank; at the same time, and the property manager's rent records are updated automatically. At the moment, however, the RealmReader works only for residential tenants (federal regulations only allow check truncation for consumer payments). But when adapted for commercial properties, it promises to eliminate yet another headache for the property manager.

Readers can contact the writer at jeverhart@globest.com