The rise of Dynamics 365 in the real estate, property, and housing market

As Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform have improved and matured over the years, a growing range of industries have adopted them. Today we see extensive deployments in all areas of financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, professional services, and beyond. When I made the decision to start my own vertical ISV business, I began a journey deep into the real estate, property, and housing market, where I saw in great detail how industry trends can create both laggards and leaders, all thanks to their mindset around business solutions and the possibilities of digital transformation.

For those who may have read some of my previous articles here on MSDynamicsWorld or who may be following me on LinkedIn and other professional social media for some time, they may recognise that I have been in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement space for more than 14 years now. Throughout those years I delivered Dynamics 365 (or Microsoft CRM as we used to call it) to a multitude of industries. However, I have always believed that the property and housing market is a particularly good fit for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, paired with the services of the Microsoft Azure cloud. It is an industry that has its own technology market (widely known as PropTech), but for years has lacked the type of innovation that can transform businesses and people's lives by implementing innovative solutions that can achieve process efficiencies, deliver tangible cost savings, and make a positive impact on customer services.

If you look at the North America, Europe, and UK markets, you will find that there are a number of established solutions and platforms available, but each with its own limitations and challenges. For example, there is a prominent real estate and property solution in North America that offers a lot of ERP back office capabilities but significantly lacks mobile-first front office capabilities. In Europe, and specifically in the UK, there are a number of widely used off-the-shelf estate agent products from various vendors, but many of these are still on-premises desktop systems that require significant investment from the  agents to install, maintain, and update.