Design And Implementation Of A Real Estate Management System

General Introduction

1.1 Introduction

Real estate can be described as Property consisting of land and the buildings on it, along with its natural resources such as crops, minerals or water, immovable property of this nature, buildings or housing in general.
Estate management is the operation, control, and oversight of commercial, industrial or residential real estate, usually on behalf of an owner. Management indicates a need for the property to be cared for, monitored and accountability given for its usable life and condition. This is much similar to the role of management in any business. This involves the processes, systems and manpower required to manage the life cycle of all acquired property as defined above including acquisition, control, accountability, responsibility, maintenance, utilization, and disposition.

One important role of a Property Manager is that of liaison between the Owner of record and the actual tenant/lessee, providing a buffer for those owners who desire to distance themselves from their tenant constituency
Other roles of the Property Manager include gathering data on tenant payment habits as well as maintaining and keeping records about tenant contacts, lease terms, property features, security deposits and payment history.

1.2 Statement of the Problem

Property Managers encounter a number of problems when performing their role of estate management. These are discussed in brief detail below.

1. Records Loss:

Information and records stored in files and documents could be physically damaged or lost due to theft and this could cripple the activities of the Property Manager.

2. Unauthorized Records Access:

As the records and information about the estates managed by the Manager are mostly stored in physical materials, it is very possible for competitors or unscrupulous individuals to gain access to these files by hiring a close associate of the Manager or via some other means. Once the files or documents containing the information are found, access to the records cannot be prevented.

3. Record Maintenance:

When the properties to be managed get very large, manually maintaining the records in the documents becomes a cumbersome task for the manager.

1.3 Aims and Objectives

This research project is aimed at implementing a Web based Real Estate Management System to automate the management of the records and information on the properties managed by the Property Manager.

The solution of the project will be implemented using a three tier distributed architecture with a database server for information storage, a middleware application and a client side application. The client side will be designed using HTML (Hyper Text Mark-Up Language) and will be viewed with a web browser. The records and information about the tenants and properties will be stored using the MySQL online database server while the middleware application will be implemented using the PHP server side scripting language.

With the successful implementation of this project, Property Managers will be able to more effectively manage the properties and estates entrusted to them.

1.4 Significance of the Study

With the successful implementation of the Web based Real Estate Management System, record loss would be eliminated as the information about the tenant contacts, lease terms, property features, security deposits and payment history would all be digitally stored on an online database which would have backup facilities. Security authorization mechanisms will be implemented and enforced the system so that only authorized users will be allowed to gain access to the information stored in the database. Also, large records will be able to be managed more efficiently and search queries will be effectively and easily performed by the system.

1.6 Scope and Limitation

The scope of this project work covers the design and implementation of a Web based Real Estate Management System that will aid Project Managers to effectively manage records about the properties and estates entrusted to them by their owners.

This project research will be limited to the management of records and information by the Property Manager and will not cover the use of the Web based system as a means of communication between the Manager and the tenants or the property owners.

1.6 Research Methodology

Source for the Data necessary for this project work will be collected through research from journals, materials from the library and the World Wide Web.

1.7 Definition of Terms

HTML:

Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) is the main markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages. HTML is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of tags enclosed in angle brackets (like), within the web page content.

PHP:

PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for Web development to produce dynamic Web pages.

MySQL:

MySQL is the world’s most used relational database management system (RDBMS) that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius’ daughter, MySQL. The SQL phrase stands for Structured Query Language.