Twenty spreadsheets and three weeks a year, replaced by a native Salesforce app.

The challenge

Each year roughly 10% of Erickson Living’s 20,000 apartments — a portfolio totaling more than $8B in inventory — changes hands and has to be repriced before it can be sold to prospective residents. When a prospect takes an apartment, they are assessed a deposit of up to 10% of its value. That deposit is a significant source of revenue, so the pricing needs to be accurate, historically auditable, and efficient.

It was none of those things. The work sat in twenty separate workbooks, one per community, eight tabs each, holding the variables, inputs, and logic that drove every price. Three people on the Marketing Intelligence team maintained them. Each annual cycle meant:

• Updating any or all of the twenty community spreadsheets for the coming year’s features and pricing logic
• Manually updating the details of thousands of individual apartments
• Uploading the resulting prices into Salesforce, which held the inventory of record

The cycle could consume three weeks of concentrated effort, and every step of it was exposed to human error on a number that directly set revenue.

The solution

We ran Erickson Living through collaborative design and development workshops to build a calculator that accounts for every variable driving price, but does it with far more flexibility, price control, team collaboration, and reporting than a workbook can offer.

Design workshops

The sessions got to the heart of the constraint and helped the team see the shape of a solution before anything was built. The problem was never the arithmetic. It was that the logic lived in twenty places and only three people could safely touch it.

Lightning Web Components

We built a spreadsheet-like interface so the Financial Operations team could work the way they already worked. Adoption was fast and training time stayed short, which matters more than it sounds — a correct system nobody adopts is a failed system.

Component-driven pricing logic

We wrote a flexible, modular pricing approach in Apex that assigns value to an apartment from its structural features and the other factors that drive price. Adding or removing an attribute is a configuration change, not a development project.

The results

Apartment attribution is now automated. Community administrators help the Marketing Intelligence team maintain valuations with minimal training and far less exposure to error. Revaluation stopped being a multi-week year-end project and became something that happens in minutes, at the time a unit actually turns over.

Adding or removing an attribute — previously up to a full business day — now takes minutes. Fewer units need touching at year end at all, because they were already handled when they changed hands.

• Consistent pricing structure. Features apply the same way across every community and apartment, and as units are enhanced their value updates consistently, in real time.
• Team collaboration. The team works in one place and communicates inside the record rather than across file versions.
• Native Salesforce application. Attributes are defined per unit against a pricing formula, entirely within Salesforce. No workbook in the loop.
• Value modeling. A unit’s value can be approximated by setting attributes against inventory records and potential upgrades, which makes it possible to test what is needed to meet projected revenue goals.
• One platform. Communication, pricing models, and inventory management happen in the same system.

What that changes in practice

Say a community is running low on inventory and Erickson Living wants to raise every apartment in it by 4%. That is now an automated change with instantly reviewable results. Previously it meant updating spreadsheets, sending them to the IT queue, waiting for IT to push and validate the data in Salesforce — days of elapsed time across several departments, for a decision the business had already made.