London Homeshare Case Study

With over 200 homes in their portfolio, London Homeshare.com has been providing travellers, working professionals and students with affordable rented accommodation for over three years. Inclusive of utility bills, accommodation varies from newly developed houses to refurbished flats, double or single rooms, shared accommodation or single studio flats. These disparate elements can be an administrative nightmare which is why the decision was made to bring in DMC to install Sage CRM.

Company name: London Homeshare
Company site: http://www.londonhomeshare.com
Product: Sage CRM
Date: 07/12/09
Region: Lonodn
No Of Seats: 15

Situation:

“Keeping track of all the tenants, the payments to different utility companies, mortgage payments to different lenders and everything else is a massive task,” explains General Manager David Rapaport.

“We have always had a CRM system in place and when we were smaller this worked adequately enough. But as we expanded it soon became apparent that we needed something far more customisable and which could be moulded to our unique needs.” And so the search was on for a replacement.

Although the company considered SalesLogix from Sage it was felt “too advanced” for their needs. “Also, at the same time we were carefully watching our budgets,” David points out. So Sage CRM seemed the next natural choice. “We have always used Sage within our business. And following some research into Sage CRM, we quickly decided that this was going to be by far the best solution for us.”

Solution:

Finding a suitable Sage reseller was a case of using Google. “We looked about and DMC Solutions came out strongly,” David explains. “So then it was a case of giving them a call, outlining our requirements and soon after that one of their guys came down to London to see us.”

David insists that installing Sage CRM was straightforward. “It took two DMC people about three to four hours.” From that point the real work started. “We definitely weren’t looking for an ‘out of the box’ solution. We wanted something completely customised and when you do that you’re essentially fixing something that isn’t broken. Logic and syntax errors soon crop up, but as an ex‐programmer myself I expected that!”

David adds, “The main thing is that it’s all been taken care of quickly and DMC did just that with nearly all the work being done remotely as part of the service package we’d agreed with them which includes Totalcare.”

Benefits:

“Taking out Totalcare has been very worthwhile,” he continues. “We are in pretty much monthly contact with DMC usually with a further project each month ‐ more customisation and more expansion. We’re a growing company and having DMC there for us makes life so much easier. Our last big development was huge. We imported all bank statements linking them to tenant records and DMC did it all perfectly.”

David intends to entrust DMC with even more of his mission‐critical tasks in the near future. “We are actually moving our server to the DMC offices,” he explains. “This will save us £6 to £10,000 a year on the cost of a BT leased line. And because the server will be under DMC’s watchful eye 24/7 it gives us great confidence in uninterrupted up time.” “All in all everything has been extremely efficient and cost‐effective,” David concludes. “DMC with their professional and timely services have simply cut our costs and made life much easier.”