DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A REAL ESTATE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
ABSTRACT
This research project is aimed at the development of an Estate Agent and Property Management System for real estate professionals. It will save time and enable estate managers sell more by empowering them to easily keep track of leads, manage listings, and market to new prospects. The basic objective of developing this project is to maintain client details line contact details, required property details, client type like residential and commercial client. Information for registration of property for sale includes property address, property description, price, facilities available. The Proposed System will have powerful logical access management in place, where each user must be identified by login id and strict password policy is applied to secure the system.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE:
1.1    Introduction
1.2    Statement of the Problem
1.3    Aims and Objectives
1.4    Significance of the Study
1.5    Scope and Limitation
1.6    Research Methodology
1.7    Definition of Terms
CHAPTER TWO:
2.1    Introduction
2.2    Real Estate
2.3    Property Manager
2.3.1    Functions of a Property Manager
2.4    Impact of Computers on Property Management
2.5    Property Management Software
CHAPTER THREE:
3.1    Introduction
3.2    Analysis of the Existing System
3.3    Problems and Weakness of the Existing System
3.4    Analysis of the New System
3.5    Design of the New System
3.5.1    Usecase Diagram
3.5.2    Database Design
3.6    System Architecture
3.6.1    Dataflow Diagram
CHAPTER FOUR:
4.1    Sources Codes
4.2    Sample Outputs
4.3    How to Run the Program
4.3.2    System Implementation
4.4    Choice of Programming Language
4.5    User Guide
CHAPTER FIVE:
5.1    Introduction
5.2    Summary
5.3    Recommendations
5.4    Conclusion
5.5    Problem Encountered
REFERENCE
APPENDIX
CHAPTER ONE
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:  HyperText 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 <html>), 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.