Leading Technology-Based Real Estate Firm Streamlines Policy and Contract Management in Just 6 Weeks

The Client: Headquartered in Texas, the client provides technology-based real estate services to companies engaged in the origination and servicing of residential mortgage loans.

Overview

To ensure commitment to compliance, the real estate provider needed to standardize their contract and policy development, review, approval, communication, and enforcement processes. The MetricStream app enabled the client to effectively track the contract and policy lifecycle and increase accountability for policy reviews and approvals. This helped the real estate provider to eliminate their existing manual systems

Solution

After considering several solutions, the real estate service provider chose the MetricStream Policy and Document Management App for the creation and maintenance of its contracts, policies, and procedures. The app offers the real estate firm a secure, centralized repository to store and access all its contracts, policies, and procedures, as well as manage their entire lifecycle, from creation to expiry. The Policy and Document Management app enables the firm to reduce their tedious, repetitive process of drafting the same contract multiple times through its template functionality, which works in conjunction with features such as the pre-approved library of clauses and language.

The MetricStream app was rolled out in less than six weeks. Today, the real estate firm uses the app as a single “source of truth” for all contracts, policies, and procedures, with users from across the enterprise being able to easily locate the information they need. It has also helped the client streamline, standardize, and automate their contract and policy management lifecycle, thereby increasing efficiency and minimizing redundancies.

Below is a brief look at how the MetricStream Policy and Document Management App is helping the client:

Creation, Review, and Approval

The app has enabled the client to implement a consistent approach to policy development. All tasks for creating, reviewing, approving, and communicating contracts, policies, or procedures have clearly defined roles and responsibilities at each stage along with completion deadlines.

Mapping of Policies to Regulations

To help ensure that all of the client’s policies are in line with regulatory compliance mandates, the MetricStream app maps the policies with customer compliance frameworks. Automated e-mail notifications and alerts are sent out to relevant users, indicating changes in regulatory requirements and policies.

Contract & Policy Communication and Implementation

Finalized contracts or policies are published to customers or employees in a read-only mode. To ensure effective communication, the Policy and Document Management app sends out automated e-mail alerts and notifications to selected customers or users across the organization, informing them about a contract, or a new or changed policy. The app also allows the customer to determine if the new policy has been effectively distributed, understood, and accepted by users.

Organization and Storage

The app provides the real estate firm with a central repository for storing and organizing all types of contracts, policies, and procedures. It also offers configurable landing pages with folder categories, and an intuitive search functionality that assists in the easy retrieval of contracts, policies, or reference documents. The client can filter contracts and policies by categories like customer name, date, and amount. Additionally, the app maintains detailed revision histories, version controls, and check-in/check-out data that help keep a check on all kinds of documents.

Reporting and Dashboards

The MetricStream app offers real-time tracking of the contract and policy management process. Every contract or policy can be traced from anywhere, and any device. Additionally, features like graphical reports and dashboards help the customer view statistics and data using various parameters such as current status, document type, audit history, approval cycle time, usage summaries, and average review time.

Challenges

With simplicity being a common practice and strong thread throughout the client’s organization, they understand the importance of having a highly transparent and less complex home buying process for all buyers, sellers, and real estate professionals. Additionally, the real estate service provider also understands that contract accuracy is a must. They realize that reducing the time that a particular commercial property remains unleased results directly in higher profits, and speeding up the process of creating contracts, lease agreements, and supporting documents translate to less downtime between leases and more income.

In this heavily regulated and continuously growing real estate market, the client has found a way to effectively streamline their contract management process to better manage thousands of contracts and supporting documents.

Benefits

• Quicker, Easier Contract and Policy Access
  Instead of dealing with multiple different folders, the client now has a central location to store and manage more than 10,000 documents including contracts, policies, and procedures. At the click of a button, users across business departments can easily locate a policy or document.
• Cost Saving due to Rapid Deployment
  The app was rolled out in 6 weeks, saving the client’s time as well as money. The app is pre-packaged with best practice templates to ensure rapid deployment and easy adoption.
• Elimination of Process Redundancies
  By streamlining the complete contract and policy development lifecycle, the MetricStream app has eliminated the duplication of effort and data. Adding further to the cost-efficiency, the app has automated multiple contract and policy workflows.
• Greater Transparency and Accountability
  The app offers clearly defined roles and responsibilities at all stages of contract and policy management, thereby improving accountability. The client can track all types of document processes in real-time. Additionally, the real estate firm can easily determine the changes made to a policy or document, who made the changes, where, when, and how.
• Highly Extensible
  The highly extensible app gives you the flexibility of integrating with other GRC processes including operational risk management, regulatory intelligence management, and internal audits, if you wish to adopt these processes in the future.