BookingsPlus has partnered with Australian firm RealeSpace to offer lettings solutions to schools and community venues, down-under.
RealeSpace was established in 2017 by a group of young professionals with a background in educational services, sports, property and event management. The company is driven by the aim of assisting schools and other community organisations, in Australia and New Zealand, to generate additional revenue from their facilities.
RealeSpace Founder and Managing Director, Gerson D’Costa explains:
“The concept of school facility hire or lettings in Australasia is not as common or mature as it is in the UK. However, schools are slowly understanding the potential and need for hiring out facilities to generate additional revenue. These organisations may not currently have the marketing capability and focus to optimise the value of their facilities and with reductions in government funding, RealeSpace aims to fill this gap.”
RealeSpace becomes the first International distributor of BookingsPlus and the sole distributor of the online lettings software system in Australia and New Zealand. RealeSpace aims to sign up a number of schools with a license to operate the system and provide them with training and support of the system as well as access to RealeSpace’s network of prospective hirers.
The company are charged a small percentage of the schools bookings revenue, whilst the facility owners will also be charged on a commission basis and RealeSpace believe this model is fair and reasonable as it incentivises both RealeSpace and the school to generate more revenue – a ‘win-win’ approach.
In the longer term, RealeSpace aims to replicate the BookingsGuru service offered by Kajima Community, founders of BookingsPlus, by providing additional services to schools such as marketing expertise, customer enquiries, bookings support and supervision of the facility during the lettings period – the full end to end bookings process.
Discussing why RealeSpace chose BookingsPlus over other available software, D’Costa says:
“We were attracted to the BookingPlus system as it provided the one stop shop bookings solution that RealeSpace believes will appeal to schools and hirers and provide a perfect interface for enquiries, bookings, invoicing and marketing.
The BookingsPlus software is the only software that we are aware of that offers an integrated bookings platform for marketing, enquiries, bookings, invoicing and reporting.”
RealeSpace believe that, in addition to the above benefits, the invoicing and report generation features differentiate BookingsPlus from many other bookings software packages that exist, making it an attractive prospect for school administrators and facility managers.
D’Costa added:
“We believe schools will view the BookingsPlus system as a very attractive proposition when presented with the marketing and administrative headaches associated with a manual system or existing off the shelf software.”
Chris Smith, Head of Kajima Community, commented:
“We are delighted that RealeSpace have chosen BookingsPlus to help drive their business forward, making the process of hiring community facilities, in Australia and New Zealand, as simple and effective as possible. The excellent team at RealeSpace are committed to helping schools make use of their assets within the community, whilst generating additional revenue for their school and we are pleased to be working collaboratively with them to help achieve their goals. ”