We Tested 4 Of The Best Real Estate Compliance Software Tools

TL;DR Summary

If you’re short on time, here’s the TLDR:

1. Jones – An easy-to-use COI management tool that offers the fastest COI verification for real estate and construction companies.

2. SmartCompliance – An easy-to-use COI management software that allows you to manage all of your insurance docs from one dashboard.

3. BCS – Real estate compliance software made more efficient thanks to its many integrations and intuitive dashboard.

4. myCOI – Allows you to track multiple documents for real estate (though a few cases of inaccuracy have been reported).

Jones — Most accurate COI management software for real estate and construction companies

Yup, that’s us. But we’re not here to promote ourselves.

We want to provide you with an objective review of our leading real estate compliance products. Our goal is to help you find the best real estate compliance software that resolves your issues.

Now, let’s review Jones.

Jones is a COI management platform specifically designed for real estate and construction companies.

We know how hard, exhausting, and time-consuming it can be for property managers to manage their COIs. You have to continuously follow up with vendors to collect compliance information.

Even after you manage to do that, you spend countless hours reviewing those COIs and managing their expirations and renewals.

That’s why we built Jones – to remove this burden while providing property managers with a 99.9% audit accuracy.

Long story short, Jones is a compliance management software created for real estate and construction companies. It helps you collect, review, and monitor COIs for multiple vendors, tenants, or subcontractors.

Schedule a demo with our team to see how Jones can help you accelerate compliance and reduce risk, or read further to see why you should (or shouldn’t) use Jones.

Key Features of Jones

1.  99.9% COI audit accuracy combined with an audit turnaround time of 5 hours on average

With Jones, you can sleep better at night knowing the COIs collected from your vendors, tenants, or subcontractors are professionally audited in 5 hours on average with a 99.9% rate of accuracy. We use two main methods to accomplish this:—First, we review all of your COIs with a powerful AI.—Then, our in-house compliance experts manually review your documents, ensuring nothing has been missed.

2. Responsive support
We know that property managers and vendors are not compliance experts. That’s why our compliance experts offer 24/7 support regarding any compliance issues.

3. Automation
Jones can be configured to send automated messages notifying vendors of compliance issues or to remind them about renewing their insurance coverage.

One property management team reported cutting COI-related workload by over 50% with Jones, reducing weekly admin time from hours to just minutes. Compliance rates also improved from under 40% to over 50% within months.

Jones – Limitations

1. Email volume
The most common complaint we get from tenants is the volume of compliance-related requests.

Unfortunately, this is unavoidable because tenants need to receive emails about their COIs and will also be cc’d on emails sent to vendors.

It’s an issue for all real estate compliance software tools. However, Jones has developed a process to make the emails less irritating through expectation management and tenant training.

Jones User Feedback

Users of Jones consistently report a very positive experience. Many reviewers highlight the platform’s outstanding customer support, noting its responsiveness and proactive assistance with any issues. They also praise Jones for significantly improving internal workflows and making compliance processes more efficient, with some mentioning that the tool is extremely easy to use for certificate management tasks. Overall, while no software is perfect, the feedback indicates strong satisfaction with Jones’s ease of use and the time savings it provides.

SmartCompliance: Centralized Insurance Document Management

SmartCompliance is a COI management software built for multiple industries but focuses mostly on commercial real estate.

Their software allows you to manage all of your tenants’ COIs from one dashboard. This means you can collect, track, and monitor all insurance coverages without jumping from one tab to another.

And since it’s a web app, you can access it from anywhere as long as you have internet access.

In addition, SmartCompliance has a full-service offering that entails a group of qualified insurance professionals who can manage the entire COI process for you. This includes setup, collection, compliance review, and tracking.

Key Features of SmartCompliance

Many users are happy with what SmartCompliance has to offer.

The numerous positive reviews on Capterra can attest to this.

Below are some of the reasons you should consider this software.

1. Intuitive design and dashboards
SmartCompliance’s design is user-friendly and displays all the critical information on an intuitive dashboard. This makes it easy for property managers to view insights about their levels of risk and compliance.

2. Multi-party collaboration
The fact that SmartCompliance allows all parties to access the platform is a plus for busy property managers.Vendors can upload all their documents and allow administrators as well as subsidiaries access to the site. The best part? You can customize what everybody can view and/or edit in the system.

3. Automated notifications
You can set SmartCompliance to send occasional messages to vendors who need to renew their insurance certificates.

SmartCompliance – Limitations

1. Low-quality reports
SmartCompliance has an insightful dashboard, but most users claim that it doesn’t give them the kind of information they want.For example, you can’t generate reports on what policies your subcontractors are missing in their COIs for effective decision-making. Plus, you can’t customize or summarize reports.

2. System rundowns
SmartCompliance users have raised concerns that the system occasionally freezes.Or sometimes, it stops reading documents, and when this happens, a large percentage of the documents fail altogether. For example, it may add check marks to categories that weren’t checked off on the actual document.

3. Longer onboarding process
There are many steps to learn and implement when using the tool.

When onboarding takes longer than expected, it won’t resonate with people who are looking for a simple solution to solving COI management.

User Feedback on SmartCompliance

According to user feedback, SmartCompliance offers helpful features like allowing vendors to upload their own documents and letting administrators customize settings for different subsidiaries or departments. This makes day-to-day monitoring of hundreds of vendors more manageable for organizations. However, reviews also report some issues with the system’s reliability and automation. For instance, the automatic certificate reading (OCR) feature can be finicky, often requiring manual corrections to ensure the data is recognized correctly. Additionally, some users have encountered system errors when uploading attachments or finding that scheduled emails do not always send out as expected. These pieces of feedback, while expressed in a neutral tone, underscore the areas where SmartCompliance may fall short and need improvement, even as it provides a generally useful service.

BCS – Easy-to-Use Compliance Tool with Broad Integration Capabilities

BCS is another great real estate compliance management software that tracks multiple documents like COIs, W9s, agreements, policy pages, and more.

Amidst all the noise on its features list, one thing stands out – an intuitive interface making it easy to navigate.

For example, here’s a screenshot of their vendor management dashboard.

Through their dashboard, property managers find it easy to collect COIs, verify them, and communicate with vendors.

Another feature is the vendor dashboard that connects tenants with service providers.

If you’re managing real estate, you’ll need compliant vendors to work on your property.

The first step is to invite multiple vendors from the platform to your upcoming project. This will start the onboarding process.

They’ll fill out their company information and contact details before submitting their COIs within the platform. BCS takes it from there by reviewing the submitted documents (a process you can view in real-time).

BCS – Key Features

BCS has a powerful user experience.

Here are some advantages compared to other compliance management software tools.

1. Customer support
The tool offers two plans, and both offer unlimited technical support. This means you can make the best use of the software with full support from their team.

Plus, once you sign up, you’ll get a dedicated account manager who will be able to assist you both during and after the onboarding process.

2. Numerous integrations
When managing real estate you don’t want to jump from one tool to another. This is a big waste of time.

BCS integrates with top property management, accounting, CRM, and procurement software.

3. Transparent pricing
Most COI management tools don’t share their pricing publicly. You only get to know how much it will cost after the demo.

BCS is an exception and has displayed pricing on their website:

BCS Limitations

BCS is ideal for property managers looking for an easy-to-use and reliable COI management tool.

But that doesn’t make it the only go-to tool for compliance management. It still has a few flaws that you should consider.

1. It’s industry agnostic
BCS made it to our list of the best real estate compliance software tools because most of its features resonate with real estate companies.

For example, it offers a tracking solution that grows with your real estate portfolio and provides responsive customer service to tenants and vendors.

However, they aren’t focused on one industry. BCS operates across nine other industries.

Because BCS isn’t a real estate-only solution, it’s not as suitable for real estate as other options on the list.

BCS User Feedback

Many users commend BCS for its user-friendly design and the efficiencies it brings to certificate tracking. For example, the dashboard makes it easy to monitor compliance status and send notices to vendors, and the implementation process is described as straightforward. At the same time, reviews highlight some pain points: handling out-of-compliance cases isn’t always straightforward and sometimes requires manual workarounds to force compliance. Others note that certain features could be improved – one common gripe is the automated messaging system, which cannot fully be turned off for certain alerts, coupled with the observation that customer support response has occasionally been slower than expected when starting out. These neutral-toned critiques indicate that while BCS is effective in many areas, there are notable areas where users see room for improvement.

myCOI – Insurance Tracking Software for Multi-Document Oversight

myCOI is a familiar name in the industry as it’s one of the oldest compliance tools dating back to 2009.

It has unique features that resonate with real estate owners looking to simplify COI management.

Benefits like accurate COI tracking and beautiful dashboards make managing the COI processes pleasurable.

Another vital thing to note is that myCOI goes beyond just reviewing COIs, thanks to a feature known as the Document Hub.

Document Hub has three benefits:

It allows you to review multiple insurance documents, including tax and other insurance forms. This is handy as you don’t have to add more systems to manage your entire arsenal of documents.

Document Hub is a central communication point. This means you can send automated communications to all the stakeholders involved in executing contracts and ask them to send relevant documents for compliance purposes.

For example, you can use the same platform to communicate with your CPA about tax docs and to automatically follow up with vendors who’ve not yet renewed their COIs.

Lastly, Document Hub offers reports on all your documents. You’ll get customized reports on COIs, W9s, and licenses on the same platform.

Key Features of myCOI

1. Ease of use
myCOI’s onboarding process is seamless, and you’ll find it easy to navigate through the platform. Plus, it doesn’t take long to get used to it.

All the processes—from collecting documents, verification, tracking, and communicating with all parties—are simple.

2. Good customer support
Most users on G2 have applauded myCOI for its excellent customer support.

3. Automated messaging
Most users appreciate that myCOI stays on top of vendors and subcontractors to inform them about insurance docs that are nearing expiration without involving the company.

myCOI – Limitations

While myCOI has attractive features, it’s not the best real estate compliance manager for everyone.

Below are some flaws that you should be aware of.

1. Document Hub isn’t user-friendly
While myCOI is an easy-to-use tool, users who’ve tried the Document Hub feature claim it’s not user-friendly enough, thus downgrading its functionality.

For example, this user says that while she loves myCOI, Document Hub doesn’t allow her to upload her own documents.

2. Reviewing COIs takes time
You’ll have to be patient while myCOI verifies your COIs, as it takes a little longer than other compliance software in this category. Users have reported that especially during the popular renewal times, MyCOI’s audit time is heavily delayed.

User Feedback on myCOI

Users acknowledge myCOI’s long-standing presence in the industry and some strengths, but their feedback also points out several pain points. A number of reviewers mention the software’s interface can be cumbersome or unintuitive – for instance, one G2 review said the system is “bogged down with shortcuts and too many ways to do one thing,” suggesting a confusing user experience. Speed is another concern: while myCOI automates COI collection, some users report that certificate reviews can be slow, occasionally requiring manual follow-ups. One user noted they sometimes have to email their contact at myCOI to expedite a COI review that’s taking too long. Other feedback highlights minor inconveniences and missing features. For example, finding specific documents can be challenging due to the lack of a standard naming convention in the system’s storage, making it hard to locate the needed COIs. Onboarding new users or setting up the system is described as lengthy, though “ultimately worth it” in terms of benefits. In summary, while myCOI is recognized for automating insurance tracking, users give neutral-sounding feedback that actually underscores frustrations with its efficiency and usability. Common themes include a clunky interface, slower document processing, and the need for improvements in organization and workflow speed.

Final verdict

Let’s quickly recap what we’ve just covered.

If you want a ready-to-go compliance tool to handle your real estate COIs, feel free to contact Jones about a demo today.

Ready to take us out for a test drive?

Book a demo today to improve your property’s performance.