Landmark Customer Case Studies - KEY Property

 

Neeb Holdings Ltd, Colchester, Essex

Neeb Holdings Limited is the umbrella company owned by the Essex based Raymond family.  The business was started in the 1970’s by Mr Raymond Senior buying and developing land and property in Essex, today the Raymonds have moved away from building and domestic projects to run a successful commercial and   industrial property investment business extending into other counties including Worcestershire.

The Group of businesses trading under Neeb Holdings are The Raymond Partnership, Frincon (Colchester) Ltd and Raymond Finance. The extensive variety of properties are all owned and managed by the group who have more than 200 tenants on the Landmark KEY Property program, which was installed in December 2003.

Brian Reynolds is the man in charge of day to day operations as the Office Manager for joint Managing Directors Messrs Raymond and Roger Raymond.  It was his job to research the Property software market at that time and following a recommendation from the group’s accountants he asked for a demonstration of the stand alone version of KEY Property to see whether it could perform alongside Sage Accounts.


Lexden House, Colchester, Essex

He says: “We had been operating a manual system for the properties prior to ’03 in conjunction with Sage Accounts, we wanted to retain Sage but we were looking to computerise rent income and rent control, including invoicing, and to manage more efficiently the property and tenant data”.

Crispin Rocholl, Director of Landmark Systems Limited, visited the Colchester office to  demonstrate the software and has managed the project through initial sale, program set up and training. 

He says: “Support and communication are an integral part of our working relationships; Landmark has built its reputation for listening to clients using rural business and property software through attention to this. You won’t find voicemail and infuriating ‘on hold music’ at Landmark!  On-site visits for this size of business are essential to physically keep tabs on the data, check that reports are being produced for management as required and to get to know the operators”.

The Neeb Holdings office team, headed by Brian with his part-time assistant Julie Ford, expect good background support service from Landmark and they use the telephone support line when necessary.

Brian Reynolds comments: “We are highly delighted with the system and enjoy both the excellent telephone support system and when required local visits to our offices.  We run a log between visits to build up a query list for Landmark to use when they are on-site, this works well - it is easy to forget a query in the ‘hurly burly’ of letting property.” 

eeb Holdings has an interesting and diverse portfolio with some big names as tenants including Vodafone, Philips, Alfred McAlpine and a logistics provider to M & S. Prestigious buildings include the Triangle Shopping Centre at Frinton on Sea, a relatively new purchase housing 21 shops and a few private flats, and a much sought after Business Park, Phoenix Square, Colchester previously home to the old Trebor factory.  Outside Essex, Vale Park is a prestigious office complex of six high specification offices at Evesham. 

The diversity of the Raymond property portfolio lends itself to the flexibility of KEY Property which was developed by Landmark Systems in 1999 to draw together information using the latest technology for a better informed approach to management.  The software concentrates on four main logical information areas for recording and recovery i.e. Landlords, Tenants, Properties and Tenancies. Multiple Landlords, as in the Neeb Holdings Group, are accommodated and each property is linked to its landlord by a unique ‘Analysis code’ for reference purposes.

Brian Reynolds says:” We like to keep tabs on the business and by running quarterly reports we can check that nothing has dropped off the system; you can always do more given the time but we feed into Landmark ideas for the style of the reports to suit our needs.  Regular dialogue is important”.

Brian Reynolds offers a further piece of advice to expanding property companies: “Maybe we should have gone computerised earlier when we were only managing sixty or seventy properties,” he says. “When the business was based on similar lettings of the small industrial unit type it would have been easier to get to know the full depth of the program.”    

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