“Being a relationship-dependent business, our vision was to create visibility into our retail tenants and leasing pipeline within one platform, and we have successfully accomplished that. The deal teams are happy, and they are excited to drive lease and renewal activity within the application, all thanks to Fortimize.”
American Campus Communities (ACC) initiated their digital transformation journey in 2018. With a customer-centric lens, they sought to digitize their entire customer experience–from lead-to-lease–for students, their families and their employees. The Fortimize and Salesforce solution for ACC enabled students to manage their entire leasing and service experience in a site-specific portal, while also allowing employees to manage current inventory and financials, as well as their complete, forward-looking leasing pipeline.
American Campus Communities is the largest public student housing operator in the United States. In 2018, they began their digital transformation journey, focusing on technology adoptions that would drive data-driven decisions and modernize their customers’ experience.
One of the early technical challenges they ran into was around traditional multi-family systems and the way inventory was managed. Traditional Real Estate ERPs center around current occupancy and availability, making it hard for executives to make decisions about the future, and for marketing to be able to apply the right tactics at the right time to build a sustainable leasing pipeline.
Salesforce was selected as the foundational platform for ACC’s transformation, due to its ability to manage inventory holistically–whether by fiscal period, academic period, or otherwise. The flexibility enabled sales, leasing and core operational functions like finance, to work out of the same platform–creating a single source of truth.
Understanding the central business challenges and desired future state, Fortimize helped ACC put together an architectural plan leveraging and surrounding the Salesforce platform. This included 4 main areas of business functionality that guided the technical solution:
On top of bringing the consulting expertise to envision the future with ACC–and craft and deploy the technical solution–Fortimize also helped ACC bring their organization along with all the change. While not fundamentally a technology company, ACC benefitted from partnering with Fortimize to drive an agile culture throughout the organization, enabling them to meet the needs of their residents by innovating faster to evolve with their needs and preferences.
