Digitize contract and payment. Improving management operations through real estate DX through GMO sign payments

Sheila Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Sheila) promotes proptech (real estate tech) with the corporate philosophy of "democratizing real estate investment around the world". The company has selected GMO Payment Gateway, Inc. (hereinafter referred to as GMO-PG) as its payment partner in improving its real estate operations, and has been adopting the PG Multi-Payment Service provided by GMO-PG since 2022.

We talked about the features of PG Multi-Payment Service and GMO sign payments used by Sheila, a real estate company that is engaged in advanced initiatives such as DX for contract and payment, and the issues that have been improved.
(Company name, position, etc. as of May 2024)

Sheila, a proptech company centered on real estate development and sales business and real estate club fan business

First, we would like to ask Kyohei Kubo, executive officer and CCO of Sheila Technologies Co., Ltd., which owns the company, about Sheila's business outline.

"Sheela offers its own self-developed condominium series, SYFORME, targeting Tokyo's 23 wards as well as the Yokohama and Kawasaki areas. By providing a one-stop service that covers everything from new construction to the development of second-hand properties and condominium management, we are able to flexibly respond to changing needs and provide 'truly valuable compact condominiums' that generate long-term stable revenue through excellent location selection and architectural design."

"In addition, we are a company that is promoting real estate DX from multiple angles with proptech as a Business Overview and is making advanced initiatives. The Senior Tech Apartments provided by Sheila are condominiums that use state-of-the-art IoT, and in addition to being able to operate various home appliances with just a call to the AI speaker, they maximize the convenience of life, such as shopping."

Sheila Technologies Inc. Group Executive Officer CCO Kyohei Kubo

"In addition to DX in real estate, we have established the Japan Real Estate Crowdfunding Association as a co-representative to promote innovation in the real estate investment industry, contribute to regional revitalization, and foster a healthy market through the formulation of self-regulatory rules," says Kubo.

As a result of various initiatives, the real estate crowdfunding "Yield-kun" operated by Sheila has achieved more than 270,000 members, which is the No. 1 in Japan. In addition, the online rental brokerage service "ietty" has over 400,000 members (as of May 2024) and has succeeded in gaining the trust of many consumers.

Urgent need to improve business operations in renewing tenants' contract and receiving renewal fees due to business expansion

While Sheila's business has expanded significantly and the number of properties to be managed has increased, the number of tenants' rental contract renewal and the collection of renewal fees will also increase.

Renewal fee collection is one of the major sources of revenue in the real estate management business. While it is gratifying that the number of monthly responses has increased, issues in the business process have also become apparent, says Naomi Sheila Imamura, who is in charge of contract and renewal of rental properties.

Sheila Co., Ltd. Development Division PM Business Unit Leader Naomi Imamura

"At that time, in the company, The business process of contract at the time of renewal and the collection of renewal fees is separated., A memorandum of understanding has been signed but no renewal fee has been paid, or vice versa, etc. There are many cases where the process is not completed It was done.

An average of about 70 updates occur per month, and about 150 updates occur in the most months contract In the midst of the enormous workload related to them, if only one of the contract renewal and the renewal fee collection has been completed, the work cannot be completed and the follow-up work will be delayed. The work of checking which processes were not completed one by one through clearing operations was even more burdensome.

In addition, one of the burdens was that we were sending and communicating with both the tenant and the owner.​
Sending documents by mail requires a lot of work costs, such as printing, binding, and enclosing contract books. Some tenants wish to cancel their contracts, so they have to deal with a wide range of tasks, including preparing documents necessary for cancellation, but I feel like I spend about half of my work time doing office work related to renewals, such as preparing renewal documents by mail and checking unfinished items.

If we can solve the problems of office work, we can expect to significantly reduce operational costs, so we began to consider digitizing contract and payment as one of the means to do so."

GMO Sign Payment with Integrated Electronic contract and Online payment

"The solution that Sheila was looking for was one that could contract renewal and collect renewal fees in one fell swoop, and we proposed 'GMO Signature Payment' as one that met that requirement," says Keisuke Onozawa, sales officer in charge of the real estate industry at GMO-PG, looking back on that time.

"GMO Sign Payment is a service that allows you to complete the registration and payment of credit cards, etc. directly on the contract execution operation line of the electronic contract service 'The electronic contract service GMO Sign' provided by GMO Global Sign Holdings Co., Ltd. is. Since the payment is completed at the same time as the contract, it is possible to improve the efficiency of contract and payment operations and reduce the risk of non-collection."

GMO-PG Keisuke Onozawa

Supporting this GMO sign payment is GMO-PG Comprehensive Online payment" PG Multi-Payment Service"。

PG Multi-Payment Service is a payment processing services that is adopted by a wide range of industries and business types, including non-product sales such as digital content and utility charge, in addition to e-commerce businesses, and provides stable payment processing with a secure system that supports a huge amount of transactions and public entity payment.

In addition, GMO-PG's sales organization has sales representatives specialized in each industry, and supports from implementation to operation with generous follow-up in line with the issues of each industry type.

"In the real estate industry, the digitalization of contract is accelerating due to the revision of the law in 2022, and based on this background, the need for GMO sign payments, which provide one-stop contract and payment, is also increasing," says Kamata, sales manager of GMO-PG, who is also from the real estate industry and has a deep understanding of the field Benevolence and beauty.

Another feature of GMO Sign Payment is that it supports Account transfer in addition to Credit card payment.

While paper-based Account transfer, which usually takes about 1 to 2 months to collect and register the application form filled out by the tenant and the transfer is executed, GMO Sign Payment's Account transfer minimizes the time lag until payment is made because it is immediately reflected when the tenant's account information is registered at the time of the tenant from a smartphone or PC, minimizing the time lag until payment is made You can.

GMO-PG Hitomi Kamada

"With GMO Signature Payment, we can solve the problem of fragmenting business processes between contract and payment, and we can digitize and centrally manage various paper-based correspondences from contract to payment. These points fit Sheila's needs, so we decided to introduce it."

We have also received high praise for the response of GMO-PG sales representatives and the usability of GMO sign payments.

"The person in charge of GMO-PG gave us a detailed explanation and carefully listened to our situation before making a detailed introduction design.

I feel that the help of the people in charge of GMO-PG was a great part of being able to smoothly and appropriately implement the important project of introducing a new system. After the introduction, the UI of GMO Sign Payment was easy to understand and easy to use."

Effects and future prospects of DX in real estate leasing

Mr. Imamura reflects on the effect of business improvement due to the introduction of GMO sign payments.

You can complete the renewal work only when you have confirmed that you have completed the contract and received the renewal fee. By completing the renewal work smoothly, I was able to devote time to rent negotiations and other tasks.

In a situation where we want to raise rent but cannot start negotiations until the renewal work is completed, using GMO Sign Payment has greatly shortened the time for renewal work, securing time for rent negotiations, and succeeding in improving productivity."

In addition to reducing resources, we also heard that it was effective in reducing mailing costs and improving work speed.

"At first, all contract letters were mailed in letter packs, and I think the postage cost was about half with the introduction of GMO sign payment. Since our staff printed the address and even sealed the documents, we were able to significantly reduce the work time from an average of about 3 hours a day to about 60 minutes now."

Both the tenants and the owners are seeing results from the introduction, says Imamura.

"We send about 70 memorandums of understanding about contract renewals to our tenants every month through GMO Sign Payment, and we have been able to sign contract smoothly with more than 80% of them.

You can immediately see on the management screen that the contract is delayed, such as it has entered the spam folder or has been left unopened, so in that case, we will inform you again via SMS. By sending it via SMS, the response is better than before, and the speed of signing the MOU has been much faster."

By being able to conclude the contract smoothly, they are now able to spend more time negotiating rents and dealing with tenants.

"Since more than half of our tenants have chosen Credit card payment, we can now complete the renewal fee payment quickly. Since the time it takes for us to clear the payment after the payment is completed has been shortened, we can now send money to the owner quickly.

We also contract the Early Payment Service of the PG Multi-Payment Service suggested by GMO-PG. By using a system that pays money two business days later, it is also very helpful that we are able to quickly respond to early reports to owners and record monthly sales within the company."

Sheila, which promotes business improvement from various perspectives, seems to be considering further development.

"While expanding the businesses of our group companies, we would like to actively recruit partner companies that can create synergies, and we would like to create a more advanced business model by combining DX and AI by building a system that seamlessly connects the diverse data obtained from each business."

"Currently, we need to clear payments to contract parties in the rental management system, but we are using Excel to link the billing information, and we are also considering actively utilizing GMO Aozora Net Bank 's virtual accounts for this area and immediately reflecting deposits and payment into our core system," says Imamura

What are the points to keep in mind when promoting real estate DX in your company?

In the real estate industry, DX is said to be lagging behind, with many communication using paper media and telephone.
We asked Mr. Kubo about the challenges to DX in the real estate industry and the points that companies that want to engage in DX should keep in mind.

"In the real estate industry, some companies exchange property confirmations by fax, and older owners may ask you to contact them on paper or by phone. Although DX has been advancing in various industries in recent years, we often hear the issue that the real estate industry has not been able to change its internal system due to the lack of knowledge about the Internet and digital, and the deep-rooted analog-oriented business habits centered on paper and telephones.

I also feel that the lack of understanding of real estate DX itself is one of the reasons why the system cannot be changed.

For example, by reducing the load on a certain task that has been handled manually through digital tools, management can create time to devote to sales activities while performing the relevant tasks without increasing the number of people. However, in the real estate industry, I think there are still no specific methods and benefits to implement them.

Many real estate companies that are trying to work on real estate DX often have their organizations composed of salespeople who do not know IT as DX promotion managers, or appoint IT personnel who do not know the site, resulting in failures due to the gap between business understanding and IT technology.

The key to success is not to try to do everything yourself.

I believe that DX can be realized if we clarify the concept, establish a reliable partner relationship with a specialized company such as GMO-PG, and have the company's promotion person play a role in coordinating the field and technology. I feel that bold decision-making, meticulous preparation, and design are very important."

Some companies in the real estate industry, like this company, have boldly challenged real estate DX and have succeeded. At GMO-PG, we will continue to accompany our customers so that we can provide services that can partner with companies that aspire to change.

(From left) Sheila Kubo, Imamura,GMO-PG Kamata, Onozawa