Royal York thrives with 19 new locations and new hires with the "total package" of Zoho One.

While most property management companies focus on multi-family residences, Royal York Property Management specializes in single family properties with the majority of their clients owning ten units or less. Since 2010, their primary focus has been to help people get the best value out of their investment through a hands-on approach to customer service.

As Royal York has grown, maintaining their standard of client trust and service has been tested by growing disorganization due to a combination of unconnected, disparate software applications. “The combination of software that we were using wasn’t cutting it. None of it was integrated, so there was a lot of double work and wasted time,” said Avi Levinson, vice president at Royal York. Even though their software solutions included G-Suite, Ring Central, and Propertyware, as their number of clients grew, it became more apparent that a new solution was needed.

Royal York's search for a more robust CRM that integrated with some of their other software solutions led them to Zoho. After starting with Zoho CRM, it became clear that Zoho was a solution to meet all the needs of their growing business. “It would have been absolute chaos to manage this many clients the way we were before. The decision to make the switch to Zoho One came about because we needed to find a system that was going to unify all of our customer service in one place. We knew exactly how we wanted to use the software and had specific goals in mind when implementing it, so understanding our business process and knowing how we wanted to use the software made the adoption of Zoho feel really logical and intuitive,” said Levinson.

Since their switch to Zoho One in May of 2019, Royal York has been in the process of streamlining the way they do business to offer the best value to their clients. Though it wasn't the original reason they moved to Zoho, Royal York became big fans of Zoho One's flexibility. “If you understand the business, and you understand what you are trying to do, you can really customize Zoho to fit the needs of your business," said Levinson. He continued, "For instance, we discovered that Zoho CRM offers so many features that help increase productivity through automation, and through that automation it has allowed us to be streamlined and nimble as a company.

While Royal York settled into Zoho quickly and had a couple years of implementation under their belt, COVID-19 brought new challenges with the switch to remote work. Like every other business, Royal York certainly wasn’t immune to the feelings of uncertainty when it came to the logistics of running a business and having their staff work from the safety of their own homes. And beyond that, they're in an industry that's generally very dominated by in-person interactions. “Everyone was in panic mode,” Levinson said. But thanks to Zoho One, Royal York was able to adapt to the changes and never skipped a beat. “It helped us make a lot of very smart business decisions in terms of how to spend our money. When COVID hit, I’m not sure what we would have done with our previous software. I think it would have just been a nightmare. With Zoho we were able to drill down and look at certain metrics, maintain those metrics, and keep our staff and the doors to our business open," he said. As a result, they became even more grateful to have everything in the same place to ensure a seamless transition. "We don’t really use anything outside of the Zoho ecosystem. I think it’s the total package,” said Levinson.

Levison's clear vision for Royal York allowed him to dive headfirst into all that Zoho One has to offer and hit the ground running with apps including Analytics, Forms, Sign, Creator and Survey. "Our productivity has gone up tremendously since we started using Zoho. Before Zoho, our staff was working in multiple systems making it inevitable that things would fall through the cracks and mistakes would be made that were costing us money. In our business, those mistakes can cost landlords thousands of dollars over the course of a lease. With Zoho One and our API integrations, our clerical errors dropped by 97% and our customer satisfaction increased by over 40%. Our employee happiness also increased by 40%," Levinson said.

Staff and client satisfaction weren't the only areas where Royal York experienced a boon after using Zoho One. "Things have become so efficient when it comes to booking showings through tracking deal stages and automated follow-up emails that we’ve gone from somebody booking an average of about 20 showings a day to about 150 showings in a day. It literally gets better and better every day as we implement more and more changes, more and more features.”

As a result of this increased productivity, Royal York has grown their staff and opened 17 new locations in Canada and two in Europe since switching to Zoho One. They have also moved all of their training processes to Zoho Showtime, allowing them to train employees virtually, thus saving Royal York time and space. "We use Showtime religiously and we use it to train for almost every single position within the company. It's a game changer and there's no way we would ever go back to how we used to train people. All of our training will live on there forever," Levison said. Clearly, Levinson and his teams' focus and drive, coupled with their ability to train quickly and maintain centralized data, has positioned Royal York to capitalize on these benefits and focus on expansion.

With the move to remote work behind them, Royal York is looking to a bright future of expansion hand in hand with Zoho. As Levinson said, “Zoho is going to allows us to scale in ways that we never anticipated. The commitment has very much been there from Zoho to say ‘We’re going to grow with you, and we’re going to make sure that you succeed, and we’re going to help you and assist you, and that means everything.”