How many excel spreadsheets does it take to run a CRE portfolio?
Commercial real estate is one of the world’s biggest economies - worth $9.5T globally - but nevertheless a lot of CRE businesses are still being run on a mix of SaaS, some home-grown SQL and let’s not forget the loads of excel spreadsheets and isolated islands of information that barely tie together.
In 2020 it is hard not to mention the impact of COVID-19 in commercial real estate as according to JLL, investment fell 29% globally in the first 6 months of 2020 compared to the previous year. As investors pursue more defensive strategies amidst ongoing economic uncertainty, the sectors that proved operationally resilient throughout the pandemic have benefitted. High value portfolio resiliency and operational efficiency is increasingly dependent on the use of data, analytics, business and artificial intelligence, leaving no room for data hoarding, data ransom and orphaned data.
If a high performing portfolio is dependent on data, how can portfolio owners build the necessary resiliency if their data is scattered across a variety of sources, in a number of clouds and heavily reliant on SaaS? There is a disturbing trend leading to critical business data of buildings being stored on external, fragmented, and inaccessible platforms making portfolio owners reliant on external sources to manage their data for them.
The way forward Responsible and informed asset management can be supported by innovative technology which can allow for an abundance of data coming from different levels of the organization and previously scattered amongst a range of sources – internal and external - to be centralized in a single source of truth. Portfolio owners aiming to achieve the necessary building resiliency and operational efficiency that the future of commercial real estate requires, must focus on streamlining property data ownership and independence through efficiently centralising operational and asset data across the portfolio.
About Build-Apps Build-Apps technology suite – ADAMM &Co. - is a CRE portfolio single source of truth. Using a PaaS (Platform as a service) framework and able to connect to multiple sources, it is an absolute game changer for putting data ownership in the hands of portfolio owners.