Tapi & Team Group Rentals | 75% Less Time on Maintenance

Greater visibility cuts maintenance admin by 75%

With Tapi’s maintenance tracking and invoice automation, Harcourts Team Group Rentals turns jobs around fast, keeping homeowners, suppliers and tenants happy. 

For two decades, Harcourts Team Group Rentals has been expertly managing properties throughout the Wellington region. Over the years, it’s witnessed significant growth and changes in the region’s real estate, but the focus has always been squarely on supporting customers when they need it the most.

Today, the team is more dedicated than ever to making sure property owners get the most out of their investment and tenants are properly cared for. With 15 staff managing over 1000 properties, there is a strong focus on efficiency and teamwork.

Introducing Brianna Billing: General Manager, Harcourt Team Group Rentals

Brianna Billing has always felt a pull towards real estate. While living in Australia, she completed a real estate course, but it wasn’t until she moved back to New Zealand in 2015 that she pursued it as a career – and realised she truly loved it.  

She joined Harcourts Team Group Rentals seven years ago, working her way up to property manager. Recently, she was promoted to General Manager – Property Management, supporting the wider property management team while still managing an impressive 300+ portfolio. 

Growing business needs to automate

Harcourts Team Group Rentals has always taken pride in timely communication, a key driver of its success and strong reputation over the years. But like many fast-growing businesses, there comes a point when “the manual tasks required for each property started to add up and we had no way to track anything,” Brianna says.

Before: no way to track maintenance jobs  

Before Tapi, Team Group Rentals used Palace to set up work orders, but there was no way of efficiently tracking job status. Every time property managers wanted an update on a job’s progress, they spent an extensive amount of time searching through emails and other communications. Without a central database, the team quickly became bogged down by admin work. 

“You would have to make phone calls or send multiple emails to see where the job was at. We never knew when the job was going to be completed until we received the invoice. Sometimes, work orders were being sent out for quoting and months would go by before anything was done. There was no real process.”

After: a single view of maintenance, from start to finish

Brianna says when Tapi came along, it was like “a breath of fresh air”. While change can take a bit of getting used to, she says, “Once we took the plunge, we were very impressed with how Tapi worked.”

The Maintenance Tracker has been a stand-out feature, significantly reducing the team’s workload with easily accessible job data stored in one system. 

Job-tracking capabilities, Brianna says, mean faster maintenance turnaround times, which is a win-win for everybody involved. She estimates Tapi has “saved up to 75% of the team’s time.”

“Tenants and owners aren’t emailing us or picking up the phone as much anymore. We don’t have to upload invoices to Palace and wait for the owner's approval – Tapi requests everything automatically.” 

Invoice automation further streamlines process

Before Tapi, some suppliers would drop off paper invoices and others would email, which left too much room for them to “get lost” – and leave suppliers chasing payment. It also took a lot of time to manually enter invoice data into the accounting system.

“If the invoice came through to Outlook, we’d have to download it, save it to a computer, rename it and then upload it into Palace.”

Brianna says Tapi’s invoice automation “has been a godsend, a huge time saver!”

Invoices are allocated to agent dashboards where owners can approve payment with one click and automated payment reminders ensure suppliers get paid on time. 

“There used to be a lot of manual work to get the invoices where they needed to be, but with Tapi, everything is in one place and it’s really easy to navigate.”

Property owners love the independence

What’s the single most important thing to landlords and property owners? Being kept in the loop. Brianna says the firm’s clients “love the addition of Tapi” because they can see what’s happening in real-time.

“The biggest thing in our business is communication and owners have loved watching where each job is at. No need to pick up the phone and call us, and vice versa.” 

Recurring work orders a welcome bonus

Brianna says that from the get-go, the Tapi customer service team has always been super helpful, and she loves how they take feedback on board. 

“I was asking Tapi for recurring work orders to be set up for lawn mowing, gutter cleaning – jobs like that. I was beyond excited when Chris (from Tapi) rang to say, ‘We’ve done it.’”