PayProp has shared its application programming interface (API) with its real estate agency clients and a growing group of leading third-party software vendors.
This will allow controlled linkage of PayProp’s platform with other popular systems in areas including customer relationship management (CRM), payments, property repairs and maintenance, accounting, collaboration and even social media.
Jaco van Eeden, co-founder and Chief Product Officer (CPO) of Humanstate – PayProp’s parent company – says integration has many benefits for the company’s partners and clients, as well as itself.
Data sharing
“Software integration is all about sharing data between systems, so our clients and the clients of our independent software vendor [ISV] partners can benefit from richer functionality without running two systems,” he says.
“Using an integrated platform is clearly more efficient for all concerned – vendor, client and partners. If we’ve learnt anything from 20 years in the business, it is that our clients can greatly and rapidly increase their bottom-line savings and growth if we can save them time and resources through seamless integration and automation.”
Accessibility and innovation
In addition to efficiencies and growth, exposing PayProp’s API will allow its customers more choices in ways to access its property data, increasing customer engagement and opening up new avenues of platform innovation, Van Eeden adds.
“With this we expect and encourage customers to implement other solutions including data processing, automation of common daily tasks like invoicing, in-house tools for data analytics, and many more.”
This has potential for a number of new applications:
- Data analysis – accessing property data outside PayProp enables customers to build analytics solutions for their personal needs.
- Process automation – it also allows users to implement other business processes, e.g. invoicing, to engage PayProp in new ways.
- Personalisation – users can build their own personalised experience with PayProp and define how they want to interact with the platform.
Focus
For third parties (partners) too, off-platform access to PayProp functionality opens up new possibilities, Van Eeden says.
"We enable our partners to focus on their technology while delegating some of the processing to PayProp as necessary. In that way, each party can focus on areas where they excel.”
“It is crucial to stay in the lead in the fast-moving world of technology and give our customers and partners all the required tools to access our platform in the various ways that they want.”
Rapid expansion
For PayProp, integration effectively adds another route to market for the company that has taken the United States (2019), Canada (2018), the United Kingdom (2015) and South Africa (2004) by storm.
“This supports our business strategy of partnering with other technology providers, giving both partners access to each other’s client bases and mutually enriching our value propositions, which opens up a growth channel into new verticals for both partners,” says Van Eeden.
What lies ahead?
Having settled on business objectives and initial targets with integration, PayProp will flesh out an integration roadmap and key performance indicators, says Van Eeden.
“The current focus is on making all the core functionality of the platform available through the PayProp API. As with any API, it is essential to correctly and precisely identify all the common needs shared by various users.”
“We have been actively exploring business solutions to integrate with. We see various exciting possibilities in areas like credit scoring, tenant referencing, inspection management, and so many more. We even have the opportunity to bring everyday tools like Google Workspace and social platform integrations into the workflow of our customers. Our priority is to identify tools and solutions that will bring the most benefit to our customers and make these integrations available via the PayProp platform.”
PayProp will announce the features to be exposed through its API and services it will integrate with when those are finalised. To learn more, visit https://payprop.com/api/docs/agency.
