Helping the Habro Group to grow

The Habro Group are fund managers who help Danish clients invest in major UK properties. Until recently, most of the Group’s portfolio was looked after by a variety of managing agents based across the UK.

But then, two years ago, Habro decided to bring all their property management in-house – to give themselves greater control.

“When I joined, we owned 45 properties, but only 4 of them were under our direct management control” says Mark Mason, the property specialist hired to set up their new property management division. “That arrangement didn’t make it very easy to monitor what was going on”.

Even worse, the 4 properties that Habro did manage were all run using ad-hoc systems – a combination of spreadsheets and standard accounting packages.

“There was no way we could have run our entire portfolio like that, and it was always my intention to bring Trace in. Trace software may be a big commitment at first but it’s the only logical solution if you want to grow your property management business.”

All the company’s properties are now managed using the BlueBox property management system; and users in both the UK and Denmark have been trained in its use. So now Mark can start to take full advantage of its more sophisticated features.

“Dealing with tenants, acting as VAT agents on behalf of Habro, reporting back to the fund managers – all these are now relatively simple routine tasks. But BlueBox is actually helping us to grow the business too. For example, we recently acquired a shopping centre and are having to deal with a fairly complex service charges. Which, of course, is a function that’s already built in to the system.”

“It’s all about confidence really. With BlueBox, we know we can easily double in size without missing a beat.”