Housemart Queenstown: small, but with big ideas

At the 2021 REINZ Awards for Excellence, the team at Housemart Queenstown were proud to take home the Innovation Award after demonstrating innovative systems that benefit the output of our work. We’d like to introduce you to our newest addition ‘Pando’ — a workflow management tool, business dashboard and analytics software designed to streamline key property management processes.

It just goes to show that you don’t have to be a big corporate team to be innovative. Craig King, Property Manager at Housemart Queenstown, has a passion for new technology and ideas, leading him to adopt an additional IT and development role. Craig took a small idea and created a system with huge benefits for our company. Two years on, we would like to introduce you to Pando, designed and developed by Craig from scratch.

Pando has allowed us to grow as a company by giving us the confidence that everything is in order and the data to support this. The name Pando is Latin for ‘I spread/grow/ expand’ and enables data to be pulled from third parties like Palace, Pipedrive, MS Office, Trello and DocuSign. It then compiles the data in one framework to monitor performance, bottlenecks, workload and compliance, and run customisable audits.

We like to describe Pando as a fantastic piece of kit!

So how did Pando come about?

Craig is very process driven and constantly on the lookout for ways to streamline procedures and minimise time spent on repetitive tasks by automating part or all the process where possible.

Previously, we used a whiteboard in our office to display our leasing funnel, KPIs and data summaries. This key information guides our team meetings and is a centralised point we constantly utilise during our work week. However, tracking important information this way was very time consuming and involved a lot of manual editing.

We first replaced the whiteboard with a large television, and our Excel wizard (Craig, of course) designed a spreadsheet to display the same information, also accessible from everyone’s PC. But it still required manual input and wasn’t very aesthetically pleasing.

The first iteration of Pando replaced the Excel spreadsheet with a database of information pulled from Palace and other applications, and a new user interface, refreshing automatically every 15 minutes. This has now developed into a dashboard offering detailed information in a clear and user-friendly format.

Tested for time-saving

With the wealth of information coming through the web application, it became clear that other timesaving ideas could be tested. Pando now incorporates a document generator (auto-filling data for tenancy agreements, bond forms, renewals and integration with online software), and customisable audits and KPIs can be displayed on personalised dashboards and shared amongst the team. Property managers can prioritise tasks and monitor portfolios, and users can semi-automate more tasks and have greater control of their data.

We are encouraging Craig to get this on the market to help others out, so come and find him at the 2022 REINZ RPM Conference and watch this space!

Julie Johnston

General Manager, Housemart Queenstown