Asana set-up question. I’m in commercial real estate and I have 130 Properties that I manage (ie property onboarding tasks, asset management, property management, lease administration, quarterly asset reviews, inspections, accounting and property sales). I need to be able to have a single source of everything related to the property in 1 project but also manage the task types by themselves being able to sort the tasks by property.
By the end of next year we will be doubling in size. I don’t know if creating a project by each property name is the right way to do this which would be cumbersome as I don’t think you can import projects. I currently have projects setup named: Asset Management, Property Management, Inspections, Property Sales and Quarterly Asset reviews but I don’t know how to best relate the tasks to the specific property that will allow for sorting tasks by property and by task type with automations based on urgency of task type how each are assigned a due date. I have forms set up in the Property Management project for tenants to complete to report a maintenance repair issue, as well as a form new tenants to complete to obtain all of the points of contact within their company so we know who to contact for certain questions, ie billing contact, property manager contact, etc. For reference, I recently signed up for Flowsana since there were many limitations with rules within Asana and am using the paid plan. Any tips on setting up Asana for this would be helpful!
there are various ways this can be set up and it really depends on how things work out best for you.
I am not sure exactly how many tasks there will be per property but I‘d probably still set up a project per property as well just for the sake of organizing and reports.
So I would have the ones you mentioned under one team
And then have one team with an Asana project per property.
The forms you set up sounds great. Now you could utilize custom fields a lot in my opinion.
For every issue or task submitted the property name would be selected + the reason why and basically what needs to be done (you could use the new multi-select custom fields for that) and then depending on the custom field/s selected it would add the task to the relevant property project and also to the relevant category project such as „Maintenance“
Then for the maintenance and other projects have sections depending on the status. And definitely set up rules that will trigger and alert you when there are any delays for tasks.
Now since a dropdown custom field can only have up to 100 options not sure if you can group your properties a bit? Such as per city or other categorizing for example.
It is a little bit difficult to really advise on the best set up having no insight onto detailed current set up and workflow and surely over time you have to go through some testing and tweaking to work out which set-up works best on the long run for you.
Also in terms of workload not sure if that is relevant to you? Let‘s say for the people that execute maintenance tasks.
Not sure if that helps but these would be my first thoughts on a potential set up.
My company does marketing materials for CRE brokerages. So while it isn’t EXACTLY the same we have many clients with many properties that have updates frequently and different kinds of materials needed for them. Our current struggle now that we’ve gone live is converting over to having all the new tools we found workarounds for in the past while we had the free version.
Like Andrea said custom fields will be your friend here. You can link these to form fields and create rules that will trigger for you based on changes in these fields.
The way my company is set up now we can’t use the workflow without major conversion and heavy lifting. I would suggest building out your reportinginfo / dashboardinfo to see if this is a better fit instead of workload?
@Marcia_Minton1 I feel your pain. I used to be a property manager and now I do digital transformation with a focus on real estate companies like yours. I am an Asana Certified Pro as well, so fee free to reach out and let me know if you want to chat directly.
Yes, I did. Sorry, been swamped. We’ve been acquiring about 10 properties a week and are closing on a portfolio of 20 next week so I’ve been underwater. Could you email me using my office email: mminton@fsctrust.com? Would love to find a time next week we could connect on a quick call.
We had several clients using Asana for real-estate management, we helped them automate a ton of tasks - extracting data from docs (tenant forms, W forms, payslips and other contracts) to Asana tasks and helped them with maintenance.
We are also in some early testing of price forecasting based on property data, and sales forecasting based on your previous sales metrics. All directly in Asana.
I’d be happy to chat if you are interested in saving time on admin work.
@iliaZelenkin I am working through setting up for my real estate portfolio and future needs. I am new to asana and would love some recommendations. Would you be open to providing some recommendations? I’d hate to set it up and waste a bunch of time.
