March 26 2019
HubSpot Impact Award Winner: Integrations Innovation for Rent Bridge Group
by Gabriela Theard
January 1, 2020 • 7 min read
Company Background: Rent Bridge Group
Rent Bridge is a property management consulting firm that helps thousands of residential properties across the nation. Rent Bridge’s automated system is built for every aspect of property management, encompassing administration, inbound marketing, operations, maintenance, and services tools. Rent Bridge is the only HubSpot Certified Partner that works with residential property management companies.
Rent Bridge helps “property managers work smarter, not harder” and aims to truly automate their business by creating a PMOS, or Property Management Operating System. By focusing on bringing automation to property management businesses and improving existing ones, Rent Bridge cultivates a specific array of technological abilities for a gargantuan market.
The idiosyncratic relationship between Rent Bridge and HubSpot prompted Rent Bridge to engineer a revolutionary HubSpot portal for the property management industry, revealing what is possible for automating their clients’ operations. To its effect, this yielded an immense workload for Rent Bridge’s managing director, Michael Park. Recreating a PMOS became a manual rendition.
The Problem: The daunting rise of manual labor
Unlike most situations, the issue wasn’t the technology, but the people necessary to re-work the technology. Albeit everyone shared the vision, Park was the only stakeholder who could accurately channel data from a property management system (Appfolio and Propertyware) to HubSpot. Everyone else was in a holding pattern for their contribution to add the HubSpot automation, while customers were awaiting delivery of the solution. Rent Bridge acquiesced, and Park began the manual data intervention to produce the portal.
Conveying data from property management software to HubSpot is a resource limitation, and required Park to work over 80 hours a week. Not only was this process painstaking, but it was also a fragile solution where human error would have a cascading effect.
The Challenge
Rent Bridge was unable and admittingly unwilling to take on more projects, not because of the system but because of the workload. Park was at maximum capacity and would not compromise Rent Bridge’s service credibility by taking on more than what could be handled.
The work needed for project completion was laborious. Files required constant manipulation and needed to be imported in a way that was usable in HubSpot. This led to inconsistency, rushed-work, and untimely execution.
"Without IntegrateHQ, I’m not really sure where we would be.”
Michael Park
Co-Founder, Managing Partner
Propertyware & AppFolio: Making the data connection
Propertyware and AppFolio serve their purpose by catering specifically to the property market. Both property management systems define solutions that take away all the painful processes for the market for lease documentation, payments, renewals, and maintenance requests. Bringing HubSpot into the equation elevates marketing, communication, and automation to a groundbreaking industry level.
Rent Bridge had one ‘Bridge’ with AppFolio, then two on the way with Propertyware. The format of files was mostly consistent for every customer, yet conveying the data into HubSpot required human intervention.
The goal was to clone the HubSpot portal and sync all files, yet the frequency of this was humanly impossible. What Rent Bridge needed was a solution that could automate their platform.
“When we approached IntegrateHQ, we developed what we call a Bridge between many of our industry software partners… so that on a daily basis, we are able to update data inside of HubSpot.”
Michael Park
Co-Founder, Managing Partner
The Solution
With previous successful file transfer customers and by mimicking Park’s manual processes, the repeatable logic was built within IntegrateHQ. Replicating Rent Bridge’s architecture, a custom integration template was designed. The logic connects AppFolio or Propertyware to HubSpot (with PropertyBoss and Buildium launching soon) and creates a scalable ‘Bridge’ product offering.
IntegrateHQ receives a file that is then consumed, manipulated, and compared. The process is done outside of HubSpot so that once data arrives, it is ready for use.
IntegrateHQ also clones Rent Bridge’s master portal to set up client portals in a matter of minutes. The system parses through emails to create HubSpot Leads based on Zillow emails. IntegrateHQ also automated complicated workflows that had exposure for failure from timeouts, human error, and formatting.
“IntegrateHQ had a monumental impact on our business…We’ve found that the team at IntegrateHQ has been great to work with. They're problem solvers… they sat down with us and really spent the time to understand…”
Michael Park
Co-Founder, Managing Partner
The Results
With IntegrateHQ, the Bridges are now launched within three days. The success evoked innovations beyond Bridges and now expands into other offers including newly added Collections and Renewals operations. Rent Bridge’s Park went from providing fulfillment to strategizing product development.
“The model that we have now is second to none. There is nothing in our industry that does what we do and we couldn’t do it without the automation built by IntegrateHQ. We've been able to take IntegrateHQ and develop a very custom data flow and we were able to take HubSpot and put them together and all of a sudden, we have a very powerful engine."
Michael Park
Co-Founder, Managing Partner
The Impact
Since May 2019, Rent Bridge has launched 21 Bridges of which 20 are new HubSpot portals. The property management firm has integration templates that share common logic across all customers. There is no longer a need to use point and click UI, resulting in massive human labor savings.
“Before IntegrateHQ, maintaining a few Bridges required 80 hours a week of Michael’s time. Now, we serve dozens of Bridges requiring only weekly meetings.”
Heather Park
Co-Founder, Managing Partner
IntegrateHQ can handle heavy, complex batch processing operations in conjunction with a plethora of CSV’s, each with thousands of rows. The integration can cache and facilitate lookups on HubSpot data in ways that their native API does not support. Finally, IntegrateHQ removed trigger-based data syncs, which failed due to timeouts, look-ups, and volume.
Rent Bridge no longer needs to manipulate files or spend extended periods of time in HubSpot’s UI, yielding outflows, custom fields, and more. Rent Bridge grew from operating property management to building out brand new features with Collections and Lease Expiration/Renewals.
“IntegrateHQ has not been just a good experience, it’s been a business changing experience for us. It’s allowed us to build something that is an industry-changing system.”
Michael Park
Co-Founder, Managing Partner
IntegrateHQ was built to connect any data or system to HubSpot directly, something no other company has ever done before.
Being the first specific HubSpot middleware, we have expert-level experience and in-depth knowledge behind our HubSpot integration projects.
IntegrateHQ fits every kind of user. Whether you have little knowledge or an in-depth understanding, our middleware adapts to all levels of technical experience.
We have the well-rounded skills and expertise to execute any integration project to the highest degree.
Visit integratehq.com for more.
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