Majestic Realty Co.

Real Estate Developer Gains Strategic Asset from Combination of Systems Integrator, ISV

Leading commercial real estate developer Majestic Realty Co. wanted to turn its Microsoft-based technology into a strategic asset. As is often the case, no single vendor offered the solution Majestic needed. The company turned to a partnership of two vendors brought together by Microsoft as part of the software company’s broader effort to team independent systems integrators and software vendors to deliver the precise combination of expertise that customers need.

Business Needs
Majestic Realty Co. didn’t become one of the largest privately-held commercial real estate developers in the United States by waiting for clients to come to them. The company has long used a variety of methods to initiate contact with brokers, clients, and potential clients to market properties, including electronic activities using various databases and software tools.

And that was the problem. The company maintained broker and client contact lists in databases, public folders, spreadsheets, and Microsoft® Office Outlook® contact lists on the network and employees’ PCs. The process for updating and managing contacts was time consuming and could result in multiple promotional messages going to the same brokers or clients.

The system’s HTML-based mailings included complex property-related data, which was difficult to embed in e-mail pages and “could require a lot of custom code,” says Aezel Corteza, IT Project Manager at Majestic Realty. “We could spend between 8 and 40 hours to produce a promotional e-mail. We wanted to be able to get those promotions out within a day.”

While the company’s marketing expertise had helped it to succeed, executives knew that more was needed if Majestic Realty were to continue to increase market share—especially given competition in a weakening market.

Majestic Realty used Microsoft technologies including Microsoft Dynamics® CRM 3.0, Microsoft SQL Server® 2005, and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. But no single product or company offered the broad range of client relationship management and e-mail marketing capabilities that the company sought. A custom solution would be time-consuming and expensive to create, when Majestic Realty needed its solution quickly and cost-effectively.

Solution
Microsoft didn’t offer a product that met all of Majestic Realty’s needs—but Microsoft had the solution for Majestic, nonetheless. In addition to offering technology, Microsoft brings together systems integrators and independent software vendors to offer comprehensive solutions—fully configured and deployed to meet distinctive or unique customer needs—that are built and run on the Microsoft platform.

This was exactly the combination that Majestic Realty was seeking. Together, the two companies provided Majestic Realty with a single, integrated solution based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 and ExactTarget for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The companies presented Majestic Realty with a single team of technical experts and project managers that held a joint planning session, then met regularly throughout the development and deployment cycle, delivering and deploying the solution in eight weeks.

The solution gives Majestic Realty the power of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 hosted at the company’s facility, with the integration of ExactTarget for Microsoft Dynamics CRM provided over the Internet in a software-plus-services model. Majestic Realty develops customer lists for direct marketing campaigns; to create the graphical and link-laden HTML e-mail messages; to deliver those messages and get them past e-mail black lists; and then to track which e-mail messages are received, and which parts of the messages engage recipients.

Benefits
Majestic Realty got the highly specific solution that it wanted, running on the Microsoft platform.

The integrated solution delivers everything that Majestic Realty wanted—and more. Templates for e-mail messages eliminate the need for coding, reduce the time to create promotional messages to less than a day, and enable more leasing staff at Majestic Realty to create their own messages without the time-consuming process of relying on an outside department. With an easy-to-use tracking system that Majestic never had before, the company has refined its mailing lists and delivers more targeted mailings.

The bottom-line benefits of this are top-of-mind for Grunzweig. “This solution will deliver faster, more comprehensive exposure of our properties to the brokers and the companies they represent who are most likely to lease them,” he says. “The result will contribute to higher, faster rates of property leasing. We’re using technology—Microsoft technology—as a strategic, competitive asset for the business.”

Grunzweig envisions other applications for this custom integration of Microsoft and Microsoft-based products: in the company’s philanthropic projects, in relations with current tenants, and in self-service kiosks based on Office SharePoint Server.

“It’s very important that these vendors could deliver a solution that integrates, expands, and increases the ROI [return on investment] with the Microsoft environment that we already have,” he says. “Microsoft is our platform of choice.”