September 23, 2010

Why building real estate software in house is no longer financially feasible

IWMS expert and Lucernex President, Joe Valeri (see Joe’s management summary here), discusses why internally developed real estate software is no longer financially feasible.

We recently attempted to sell our applications to a very large retail chain which ended with them deciding that their “IT department had looked at everything out there and they decided to build it in-house instead.”

While it has become far less common, there remain corporate, retail and healthcare companies that still go down the road of building their own real estate management software. In the current economy, with the number of low-cost and low-risk software options out there today, I can’t imagine how a valid financial argument can be made to justify the internal short and long-term cost of an internally developed application.
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