How Oxer Eiendom gains competitive advantage with modern property management

Oxer Eiendom is one of Oslo’s largest players in property management and development of commercial real estate, and the company currently manages approximately 260,000 sqm of residential and commercial property from Oslo North, via Asker to Drammen.

Oxer manages all its properties itself, with the goal of running efficient operations that maintain and create satisfied tenants through good follow-up and personal service.

"It should feel like you are in an Oxer building". - Property Manager, Ole-Jørgen Stenmark

In this article, we will look at how Oxer managed to streamline operations, increase productivity and at the same time create even more satisfied tenants.

Two costly challenges

There were two challenges standing in the way of Oxer’s goals of satisfied tenants and efficient operations in their property management.

1. Inaccessible information and documentation spread across multiple property management systems and various sources. “We previously had to use multiple systems for the buildings, which led to an unclear situation, while the documentation also became insufficient on several of our buildings. We spent a lot of time trying to get the right information at the right time.”
2. Unclear communication where parties in the building interacted across many different channels. Tenants could contact the facility manager by phone, the property manager could forward an email to a facility manager, who could then pass it on to a supplier, and so on. “It resulted in a chaos of communication threads that made it impossible for all parties to keep track of what was happening in the buildings. It also meant we were unable to respond to tenant enquiries as quickly as we wanted.”

Why was it so important to solve these two challenges?

Empty premises and tenant turnover is the single biggest cost for a landlord. We needed a platform that both streamlines operations and at the same time contributes to increased tenant satisfaction to counteract this.

The solution

Ole-Jørgen and the rest of the team at Oxer had been looking for solutions that could help them overcome the two issues related to inaccessible information and unclear communication. What was especially important was that the FM system should be modern and easy to use for everyone, so that the tool would not become a “dead” system. It was also important that they appeared as a modern property manager to their clients.

Oxer centralised both documentation and the communication flow across its buildings in favour of more efficient operations and satisfied tenants.

Competitive advantage as a modern property manager

Previously, Oxer had multiple FM systems, some of which were so outdated that they in practice just sat there as “dead archive systems”. Nevertheless, much important documentation was stored there that could not be lost. The cost of switching to a new FM system was therefore an initial concern, but this was resolved very smoothly.

The transition has gone very smoothly, with minimal time investment on our part. Beyond all expectations of what I thought was possible.

In addition to having achieved more profitable operations, the property manager concludes with the following:

We are now a modern property manager that looks after our tenants in the best possible way. That makes us a preferred landlord and is our most important competitive advantage.