Real estate project management software: 11 of the best options

Tailor project management to your real estate team, with Wrike

Wrike brings deep, detailed project planning tools alongside real-time collaboration and resource management. When you work in Wrike, you can build the perfect project management system for any team in the real estate sector. 

Handle long-term, large-scale projects with ease

Real estate projects can be large and complex. Often, software comparison posts written for this industry assume they’re talking to realtors organizing projects like open houses — something that does need coordination to bring together, but can usually be managed with a simple Kanban board or checklist tool. 

Wrike handles smaller projects like this perfectly (our list of features even includes an automated Kanban overview). But the difference between Wrike and a simpler tool is the scalability. Even if you’re running dozens of projects at a real estate firm, managing a property portfolio, or working in construction with a task list that runs to hundreds of items, Wrike keeps everything in view. 

For example, the backbone of a Wrike workspace is our comprehensive, real-time project dashboard feature. Wrike’s dashboards give you a 360° overview of your latest project data, including the headline information on your project progress, team capacity, project finances, and more. 

When you’re managing projects at scale, you can also create templates for your repeatable tasks. With tools like custom item types and blueprints, you can add your common tasks to your workspace quickly and effectively, saving time at the start of each new workflow and reducing human error in data entry.  

Then, Wrike’s dashboards pull data from hundreds of those tasks and subtasks to display your overall project status. This visibility is exactly what you need when you’re in a subsection of real estate like development and construction. 

Wrike’s dashboards are also completely customizable. At any point during your project, you can add a new widget to help you view your ongoing work from another angle. For example, once a construction project moves out of the planning stages and into a phase where you have contractors on site, you can display more time tracking information in your dashboard. This can help you keep a closer eye on your outgoings and how they impact the project’s profitability as you move into a new phase of work. 

Even better, when you work in Wrike, all your tasks are centralized and connected, no matter how complex your project becomes. With Wrike’s rule-based automations, when a task changes status in one area of your real estate workspace, it updates everywhere. 

Say, for example, you’re managing the marketing around that same new real estate development. 

Your goal is to launch a website to market the properties, but you’re still waiting on updated graphics from the architecture firm. If you decide to postpone the launch date for the site, Wrike’s dynamic task dependencies mean that milestone updates will be made everywhere:

• In the Gantt chart timeline you’re using to track your actual progress against the plan
• In the personal dashboards of the team members assigned to that task 
• In the Kanban board that’s tracking all the active tasks in your project
• In the project management dashboard your company’s executive is using to track the work 

Finally, with Wrike’s AI-powered risk management software, your project management system will also alert you if a change earlier in your timeline puts a later milestone at risk. This gives you time to step in to reschedule or reallocate resources before your timeline slips, which gives you an extra layer of reassurance when you’re managing complex, dynamic, long-term projects in this sector. 

Coordinate complex project schedules

Real estate projects need contributions from many different parties to make them work, which can make project scheduling very complex. 

For example, when you work in real estate management, you’ll often have a large number of rentals to work on, each with its own maintenance and inspection schedule that needs to be coordinated with your contractor and the times your renters are available. This means you need your project management software to: 

• Show you when work can be scheduled 
• Share that schedule with everyone who needs to see it
• Make it easy to update your timeline if something changes 
• Communicate those changes to your team both in the office and on the ground 

To manage overlapping, shifting, or dependent timelines, Wrike includes a raft of automated scheduling features. 

Once you add your tasks and dates to Wrike, you can view your timeline from multiple angles — like Gantt charts and critical path diagrams, Kanban boards, a team calendar, and even burndown charts. This gives you a more detailed understanding of your project timeline and your progress, so you can account for every task in the project lifecycle. 

Wrike also includes tools for capacity management, so you can make more informed decisions about work distribution at every stage of your project. These tools — which give you a real-time overview of who’s available — help you allocate tasks and resources fairly. This is particularly useful in an industry like construction, where workloads can fluctuate seasonally. And, for real estate, Wrike now includes asset scheduling and tracking features to use alongside your team calendar. These features are invaluable for teams that need to manage shared resources like equipment and specialized tools. As well as tracking the availability of those resources, Wrike helps you share that schedule with team members who aren’t always online. 

With these features, you have a project schedule that acts as a central source of truth for every part of your real estate team. It’s not just your project manager who sees the latest information on the schedule; all the teams on the ground can view it too. With this shared, responsive timeline, it’s easy and fast to coordinate even the most complex real estate schedules.  

Collaborate with multiple parties in real time

Real estate is a team game, and unlike in other industries, the people who contribute can have different skillsets, specialities, and ways of working. For example, a realty office is far more than just realtors — it takes marketers, customer support and care specialists, and legal and compliance teams to close a sale. It’s not unusual for all those disparate teams to use different tools and workflows to complete their tasks.

Wrike is set up to unite these different teams. 

When you take on new projects, you can use Wrike’s dynamic request forms to gather the crucial information, create the task, schedule the subtasks, and kick off a standard workflow. This feature can be useful in a brokerage, for example, to assign new listings and give agents the information they need to hit the ground running. You can also set up external request forms. 

For example, if you work in real estate management, you can use these forms to standardize and centralize the way your renters submit maintenance requests. Wrike keeps working even when you leave the office. If you need to collaborate with team members in the field, they can use the mobile app to access the same high-level dashboards and detailed task breakdowns they could view on a desktop. Wrike tracks your tasks wherever you are, so you always have real-time updates about your projects at your fingertips. 

Plus, you can use Wrike to communicate this information seamlessly with external collaborators, like outside agencies, contractors, or clients.

For example, if you’re managing a real estate project on behalf of a client, you can give them access permission to view your project dashboards and keep them in the loop. You can share Wrike’s custom project reports as snapshots of your progress ahead of a check-in meeting. And you can even communicate with that external client from within Wrike, and keep their responses attached to the task card for your team members to view. 

Compared to the maze of email updates or team messaging channels that are traditionally used to manage a real estate project, all of these collaboration features speed up your work and make your projects more transparent. 

Stay compliant with approval and document workflows

The real estate industry is very heavily regulated, for example, in terms of safety and the environmental impact of new projects. To make matters even more complex, larger real estate companies may have to handle regulations that change depending on local legislation in their separate offices. 

All this makes it crucial that your real estate project management software tracks your interactions with clients or contractors and documents your process so your work can be easily audited. 

Wrike is built to protect your project data with enterprise-grade security. What’s more, Wrike’s customization and automation features help you track the entire history of your project, no matter how many months it takes to complete. 

Wrike’s workflows can also be set up with rigorous approvals and automated file routing. 

For example, imagine a document workflow to handle the contracts for a commercial real estate space. Each new contract you create can pass through the same workflow stages of contract creation, review, and approval before you send it to a new tenant. Then, when the contract is signed, you can set Wrike up to route the document to a secure project folder, organized in the way that makes most sense for your company. 

These simple, secure, rule-based automations mean that you can call the documentation up in seconds if you need to review it later. Rather than combing through old emails to find the final version of the contract, you go to the folder associated with, for example, that year or that unit, and find the paperwork you need. Wrike also makes it easy to review the decisions you made during a project by saving the history of your tasks on the cards you use to track them. 

If you have a question about who approved a certain decision, you simply call up the task card and review the comments and status changes. This builds accountability into your workflows as they’re in progress, and keeps total visibility even after your projects are complete. 

To sum up, Wrike is the perfect project management software for real estate. Our workspaces are flexible, scalable, and secure. Wrike is easy to adopt, and you can adapt your overview to every subteam on your project, no matter their location or their working style. Finally, Wrike tracks your projects in granular detail, giving you the most accurate view of your project status and the complete history you need to sign off on each task with confidence. 

Now, let’s turn to some examples of how real estate companies are using Wrike to plan, execute, and review their projects.