Commercial Real Estate (CRE) is constantly evolving. Market uncertainty is at an all-time high with rising interest rates and cap rates and declining transaction volume as the norm. Owners/operators, investors, borrowers, and other industry professionals remain in a fog as they determine the best next steps for their portfolio given current market and economic factors.
In these conditions, understanding the market and making the right moves for your portfolio hinges on your ability to harness the power of data effectively. In 2024, the importance of data in shaping strategies, driving decision-making processes, and fostering growth has never been more pronounced.
During our upcoming webinar, Unlocking CRE’s Data Potential: Shattering Silos and Fortifying Your Data in 2024, we’ll equip you with the knowledge and tools needed to transform your data challenges into opportunities, ensuring you’re leading the charge in data-driven, secure, and optimized real estate operations.
Register for the webinar now! Or, read ahead for a sneak peak into the three key topics we’ll discuss during the conversation.
Navigating the Data Maze for Actionable Insights
Commercial real estate data provides insights into market trends, portfolio performance, and investment opportunities. But to unlock the power of this data, you must first understand which data sources are available. From there, you can identify which sources to leverage to achieve your goals and objectives. From external data sources (i.e JOBS reports and census data) to internal data sources (i.e. financial, operational, and peer-to-peer benchmark data), access to actionable data is more readily available than ever before. Early adopters are seizing these opportunities, using relevant data and layering multiple sources to maximize their insights and drive growth.
Whether it’s identifying optimal investment opportunities or anticipating the needs of evolving communities, data holds the key to unlocking untapped potential.
Breaking Down Barriers to Improve Efficiencies
Internal CRE data silos can create unnecessary challenges across your firm. Fragmented data across departments, disparate asset management models, and compartmentalized communication channels hinder collaboration and breed inefficiency. Overcoming these hurdles requires data centralization, consolidation, and standardization. Streamlining communication channels is critical in breaking down internal silos. Heavy reliance on email communication and departmentalized workflows exacerbate the problem, leading to inefficiencies and delays. For example, consider this scenario: you’re working on a project and require information stored on a teammate’s desktop. However, your access is limited, leaving you unable to retrieve the necessary data. Consequently, you’re reliant on your colleague to share this information, potentially causing delays that impact your deadlines. Or maybe you think you have a copy of this info, but you aren’t sure whether it’s the most recent version. Clearly, this is a problem and can expose your firm to risk, inopportune next steps, or errors.
When different teams operate with disparate workflows that fail to align, collaboration becomes difficult and inefficiencies inevitably arise. Implementing centralized data management solutions can pave the way for more informed decision-making processes. By consolidating all data into a single source of truth, teams gain access to real-time information. Consequently, decision-makers can confidently rely on accurate data, leading to more informed and effective actions.
Additionally, empowering stakeholders with controlled data access can further streamline operations and enhance collaboration. Controlled data access ensures that individuals have the necessary information pertinent to their roles, fostering a more efficient decision-making process. Consolidating data from disparate property management systems enables property managers and asset managers to align their perspectives and work off a unified dataset. This integration facilitates apples-to-apples comparisons, allowing for faster access to relevant metrics and insights. With everyone on the same page regarding data types and metrics, teams can swiftly extract valuable insights and ensure widespread access to critical information.
Unlocking the Power of AI, BI, and HI to Advance Your Data
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Business Intelligence (BI), and Human Intelligence (HI) play a pivotal role in maximizing CRE data. AI automates data analysis, BI aggregates and centralizes information, and HI provides the critical human touch necessary for decision-making. Together, these tools form a powerful trifecta, enabling firms to extract valuable insights, uncover hidden trends, and optimize business operations.
Next Steps: Register for Our Webinar
To learn more, register to join our webinar where speakers, Matt Lexow-Gray and Brian Lanehart, delve deeper into these key topics:
- The dynamic universe of data sources shaping today’s market and identifying those vital for your CRE firm
- Crucial strategies to overcome internal and external data obstacles, ushering in a new era of robust data management
- Ways system consolidation can streamline operations to enhance efficiency and supercharge your decision-making process
- The transformative role of advanced technology in unlocking the full potential of CRE data while bolstering its security, maximizing its value, and ultimately optimizing business operations
These insights will not only position you to excel in 2024 but also thrive to 2025. Click here to join the conversation.
Looking for next steps?
Reach out to us for a personal demo and learn how Lobby CRE can be the best fit for you.
Additional Resources
Commercial Real Estate (CRE) is constantly evolving. Market uncertainty is at an all-time high with rising interest rates and cap rates and declining transaction volume as the norm. Owners/operators, investors, borrowers, and other industry professionals remain in a fog as they determine the best next steps for their portfolio given current market and economic factors.
In these conditions, understanding the market and making the right moves for your portfolio hinges on your ability to harness the power of data effectively. In 2024, the importance of data in shaping strategies, driving decision-making processes, and fostering growth has never been more pronounced.
During our upcoming webinar, Unlocking CRE’s Data Potential: Shattering Silos and Fortifying Your Data in 2024, we’ll equip you with the knowledge and tools needed to transform your data challenges into opportunities, ensuring you’re leading the charge in data-driven, secure, and optimized real estate operations.
Register for the webinar now! Or, read ahead for a sneak peak into the three key topics we’ll discuss during the conversation.
Navigating the Data Maze for Actionable Insights
Commercial real estate data provides insights into market trends, portfolio performance, and investment opportunities. But to unlock the power of this data, you must first understand which data sources are available. From there, you can identify which sources to leverage to achieve your goals and objectives. From external data sources (i.e JOBS reports and census data) to internal data sources (i.e. financial, operational, and peer-to-peer benchmark data), access to actionable data is more readily available than ever before. Early adopters are seizing these opportunities, using relevant data and layering multiple sources to maximize their insights and drive growth.
Whether it’s identifying optimal investment opportunities or anticipating the needs of evolving communities, data holds the key to unlocking untapped potential.
Breaking Down Barriers to Improve Efficiencies
Internal data silos can create unnecessary challenges across your firm. Fragmented data across departments, disparate asset management models, and compartmentalized communication channels hinder collaboration and breed inefficiency. Overcoming these hurdles requires data centralization, consolidation, and standardization. Streamlining communication channels is critical in breaking down internal silos. Heavy reliance on email communication and departmentalized workflows exacerbate the problem, leading to inefficiencies and delays. For example, consider this scenario: you’re working on a project and require information stored on a teammate’s desktop. However, your access is limited, leaving you unable to retrieve the necessary data. Consequently, you’re reliant on your colleague to share this information, potentially causing delays that impact your deadlines. Or maybe you think you have a copy of this info, but you aren’t sure whether it’s the most recent version. Clearly, this is a problem and can expose your firm to risk, inopportune next steps, or errors.
When different teams operate with disparate workflows that fail to align, collaboration becomes difficult and inefficiencies inevitably arise. Implementing centralized data management solutions can pave the way for more informed decision-making processes. By consolidating all data into a single source of truth, teams gain access to real-time information. Consequently, decision-makers can confidently rely on accurate data, leading to more informed and effective actions.
Additionally, empowering stakeholders with controlled data access can further streamline operations and enhance collaboration. Controlled data access ensures that individuals have the necessary information pertinent to their roles, fostering a more efficient decision-making process. Consolidating data from disparate property management systems enables property managers and asset managers to align their perspectives and work off a unified dataset. This integration facilitates apples-to-apples comparisons, allowing for faster access to relevant metrics and insights. With everyone on the same page regarding data types and metrics, teams can swiftly extract valuable insights and ensure widespread access to critical information.
Unlocking the Power of AI, BI, and HI to Advance Your Data
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Business Intelligence (BI), and Human Intelligence (HI) play a pivotal role in maximizing CRE data. AI automates data analysis, BI aggregates and centralizes information, and HI provides the critical human touch necessary for decision-making. Together, these tools form a powerful trifecta, enabling firms to extract valuable insights, uncover hidden trends, and optimize business operations.
Next Steps: Register for Our Webinar
To learn more, register to join our webinar where speakers, Matt Lexow-Gray and Brian Lanehart, delve deeper into these key topics:
- The dynamic universe of data sources shaping today’s market and identifying those vital for your CRE firm
- Crucial strategies to overcome internal and external data obstacles, ushering in a new era of robust data management
- Ways system consolidation can streamline operations to enhance efficiency and supercharge your decision-making process
- The transformative role of advanced technology in unlocking the full potential of CRE data while bolstering its security, maximizing its value, and ultimately optimizing business operations
These insights will not only position you to excel in 2024 but also thrive to 2025. Click here to join the conversation.
Accessing & Leveraging CRE Market Benchmark Data
In the tumultuous landscape of 2024, commercial real estate (CRE) firms find themselves navigating through a whirlwind of uncertainty. Owners/operators, asset managers, property managers, and other industry professionals are grappling with a common question: “Is it me or the market?” Without a clear answer to that question, many are making decisions based on assumptions, leading to performance concerns and reliance on gut instincts.
The Income/Expense IQ Benchmark, powered by a partnership among four CRE industry leaders – Lobby CRE, the Institute of Real Estate Management (IREM), the National Apartment Association (NAA), and the Building Owners & Managers Association (BOMA) – offers a comprehensive resource for CRE stakeholders and practitioners. CRE stakeholders and practitioners who are seeking to identify portfolio opportunities, gain actionable insights, evaluate their properties’ performance against relevant market data, and build budgets faster are highly encouraged to participate in the Income/Expense IQ Benchmark program. This initiative provides market benchmarks consisting of anonymized financial data from participating CRE firms, broken out by property types and individual metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). For instance, individuals can access and leverage a market benchmark for multifamily property types in the Charlotte, North Carolina metro area.
With this tool, CRE professionals can chart a clear roadmap to not only navigate through the market turbulence but also to outperform it. Ahead, we’ll explore the power of data in CRE. Download Lobby CRE’s Checklist for quick tips to get started and ideas for how you can leverage the data, or read ahead to learn about the power of market benchmarks.
Unlocking the Value of Data
Data has become the cornerstone of modern business operations, yet many CRE professionals struggle to harness its full potential. According to a survey by NewVantage Partners, a significant portion of companies – 53%, to be exact – admit to not leveraging data as a business asset. Historically, the challenge has been the inability to quickly extract actionable insights due to data being siloed across systems or being generated in different formats, such as spreadsheets, PDFs, and Word documents.
However, the tide is turning. With business intelligence tools, CRE firms can automate data collection and reporting, offering a more efficient means of managing performance metrics. However, such systems often only provide an internal view. To truly discern whether performance issues lie within the firm or are market-driven, firms must integrate market data to create a comprehensive portfolio analysis. Once a solid reporting foundation has been established, layering market data on top provides insights that were previously overlooked. Additionally, the availability of third-party datasets, including census data and weather records, further enhances the potential for gaining valuable insights into market trends and external factors affecting performance.
Leveraging Third-Party Data for Profitability
One of the most effective strategies for maximizing profitability in CRE is benchmarking performance against market data. By amalgamating third-party data, such as the Income/Expense IQ Benchmark, with publicly available datasets like CMBS, CRE teams can make more informed decisions by integrating market data with portfolio insights, thereby gaining valuable perspectives on market trends, pricing dynamics, and overall performance. These datasets enable CRE teams to anticipate market trends, identify potential areas for cost savings or revenue generation, and uncover new growth opportunities.
In this blog, learn about three types of actionable data you can extract from benchmark data and use to make more proactive, informed decisions.
The Income/Expense IQ Benchmark Program
With Lobby CRE, individuals can utilize Income/Expense IQ Benchmarks, gaining access to market benchmark data and insights tailored to their metro areas. Lobby CRE’s partnerships facilitate the provision of this invaluable resource, enabling users to seamlessly compare their property’s metrics directly alongside Income/Expense IQ Benchmarks.
Additionally, the Income/Expense IQ Benchmark is delivered through Lobby CRE’s platform, allowing individuals to create a complimentary account and access all the market benchmarks for each property type and MSA. Users can leverage features like the Benchmark Dashboard for real-time comparison and analysis of property performance against relevant market data.
Download Lobby CRE’s Checklist
In today’s increasingly digital and data-driven landscape, the ability to harness the power of data is essential for maximizing profitability and driving success in commercial real estate. With Lobby CRE’s Market Benchmark Data Checklist, accessing and leveraging market benchmark data has never been easier or more accessible. Start your journey towards data-driven success today by downloading the checklist and revolutionizing your CRE strategy with Lobby CRE.
Looking for next steps?
Reach out to us for a personal demo and learn how Lobby CRE can be the best fit for you.
Additional Resources
A commercial real estate (CRE) property management system, more commonly referred to as a PMS, is a system used by property managers to manage functions such as leasing, marketing, and accounting for multifamily housing. Today, many CRE firms operate with multiple PMS, hindering them from achieving operational efficiencies. This typically occurs when individual properties across the portfolio use different systems, creating challenges when it comes to portfolio-level reporting.
In this blog, we explore the power of consolidating property management systems to drive efficiencies, enable faster reporting, and ensure that your portfolio functions at full optimization.
Why Firms May Have Multiple CRE Property Management Systems
At Lobby CRE, our team has had many discussions with clients, prospective clients, and industry leaders alike about property management systems. Throughout these conversations, we’ve learned that at one time or another (even currently), many firms have found themselves navigating multiple systems. Although their reasons for using decentralized PMS vary, the majority readily acknowledge it as a problem that slows down efficiency and keeps the business from performing at its peak.
The challenges of managing diverse PMS in an expanding portfolio include the increased potential for errors, inefficiencies in data management, and a lack of cohesion in overall property management strategies. Also, differing reporting formats leave no room for “apples to apples” comparisons across the portfolio.
Resistance to change is a common sentiment in industries where established processes and systems have been ingrained over time. Commercial real estate professionals may be reluctant to transition from familiar legacy systems due to concerns about disruptions, potential learning curves, and the perceived risks associated with adopting new technologies. This resistance to change may also contribute to the coexistence of multiple PMS, hindering operational efficiency as teams work within the confines of outdated or incompatible systems.
Property Management Systems: Challenges with Data Silos
Data silos are one of the most common challenges CRE firms encounter when dealing with more than one property management system. When data is scattered across multiple systems and tools, redundancies and inefficiencies are more likely to occur. Tasks that should be streamlined, such as reporting and analytics, become time-consuming as teams are forced to learn multiple platforms, wait for access to tools or reports, and other preventable roadblocks
Data silos can also slow cross-departmental communication. This lack of cohesion can lead to missed opportunities, delayed responses to issues, and a breakdown in overall collaboration.
Finally, compliance with industry regulations becomes challenging when property data is stored across disparate systems. The risk of errors increases, exposing commercial real estate firms to potential legal and financial repercussions.
Three Benefits of Consolidating Your CRE Property Management Systems
Commercial real estate property management system consolidation is not just a trend; it’s a strategic move. By addressing the challenges of multiple PMS and data silos, CRE firms can better reach the full potential of their portfolios, enabling success in a competitive market.
Here are three benefits of consolidating your CRE property management systems:
-
Improved Operational Efficiency
Asset managers are responsible for ensuring success across the portfolio. When property management systems aren’t aligned, it can become difficult for asset managers to keep a tight rein on the business and its performance. Consolidated property management systems make it easier for asset managers to access the data they need at the right time. As a result, they can spend more time focusing on generating reports rather than trying to collect scattered data.
-
Unified Data and Reporting
One of the most significant advantages of consolidation is the creation of a centralized repository for all property-related data. This fosters better reporting and analytics, providing valuable insights that can inform strategic decision-making. For asset managers, the ability to report across the portfolio is critical for effective management. A centralized property management system can be helpful in ensuring asset managers have access to the data that they need for all types of reporting.
-
Faster, Deeper Insights
The speed of the data and insights you receive is directly connected to how timely you can identify and respond to potential challenges or performance issues in your portfolio. Consolidation creates a single source of truth for all property-related data. This centralized approach eliminates the need to gather information from disparate systems, speeding up the reporting process. When all data – from tenant information to financials and maintenance records – is stored in one place, generating reports becomes more efficient. With data consolidated into one system, the chances of errors that can occur from manual data entry or transferring information between different platforms are significantly reduced. This leads to higher data integrity and accuracy in reports.
How Asset Management Software Consolidates Multiple PMS and Data Sources
An asset management solution such as Lobby CRE can aggregate and analyze data from multiple disparate sources – such as property management systems, accounting software, and lease administration platforms. By integrating systems, teams can identify where the data is misaligned and then fill in the gaps.
This type of functionality scales your reporting efforts and equips your firm with easy, quick access to high-quality, accurate reporting. Reports that are generated from integrated datasets represent a more complete view of your information so that you can make accurate decisions.
Accessing & Leveraging CRE Market Benchmark Data
In the tumultuous landscape of 2024, commercial real estate (CRE) firms find themselves navigating through a whirlwind of uncertainty. Owners/operators, asset managers, property managers, and other industry professionals are grappling with a common question: “Is it me or the market?” Without a clear answer to that question, many are making decisions based on assumptions, leading to performance concerns and reliance on gut instincts.
The Income/Expense IQ Benchmark, powered by a partnership among four CRE industry leaders – Lobby CRE, the Institute of Real Estate Management (IREM), the National Apartment Association (NAA), and the Building Owners & Managers Association (BOMA) – offers a comprehensive resource for CRE stakeholders and practitioners. CRE stakeholders and practitioners who are seeking to identify portfolio opportunities, gain actionable insights, evaluate their properties’ performance against relevant market data, and build budgets faster are highly encouraged to participate in the Income/Expense IQ Benchmark program. This initiative provides market benchmarks consisting of anonymized financial data from participating CRE firms, broken out by property types and individual metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). For instance, individuals can access and leverage a market benchmark for multifamily property types in the Charlotte, North Carolina metro area.
With this tool, CRE professionals can chart a clear roadmap to not only navigate through the market turbulence but also to outperform it. Ahead, we’ll explore the power of data in CRE. Download Lobby CRE’s Checklist for quick tips to get started and ideas for how you can leverage the data, or read ahead to learn about the power of market benchmarks.
Unlocking the Value of Data
Data has become the cornerstone of modern business operations, yet many CRE professionals struggle to harness its full potential. According to a survey by NewVantage Partners, a significant portion of companies – 53%, to be exact – admit to not leveraging data as a business asset. Historically, the challenge has been the inability to quickly extract actionable insights due to data being siloed across systems or being generated in different formats, such as spreadsheets, PDFs, and Word documents.
However, the tide is turning. With business intelligence tools, CRE firms can automate data collection and reporting, offering a more efficient means of managing performance metrics. However, such systems often only provide an internal view. To truly discern whether performance issues lie within the firm or are market-driven, firms must integrate market data to create a comprehensive portfolio analysis. Once a solid reporting foundation has been established, layering market data on top provides insights that were previously overlooked. Additionally, the availability of third-party datasets, including census data and weather records, further enhances the potential for gaining valuable insights into market trends and external factors affecting performance.
Leveraging Third-Party Data for Profitability
One of the most effective strategies for maximizing profitability in CRE is benchmarking performance against market data. By amalgamating third-party data, such as the Income/Expense IQ Benchmark, with publicly available datasets like CMBS, CRE teams can make more informed decisions by integrating market data with portfolio insights, thereby gaining valuable perspectives on market trends, pricing dynamics, and overall performance. These datasets enable CRE teams to anticipate market trends, identify potential areas for cost savings or revenue generation, and uncover new growth opportunities.
In this blog, learn about three types of actionable data you can extract from benchmark data and use to make more proactive, informed decisions.
The Income/Expense IQ Benchmark Program
With Lobby CRE, individuals can utilize Income/Expense IQ Benchmarks, gaining access to market benchmark data and insights tailored to their metro areas. Lobby CRE’s partnerships facilitate the provision of this invaluable resource, enabling users to seamlessly compare their property’s metrics directly alongside Income/Expense IQ Benchmarks.
Additionally, the Income/Expense IQ Benchmark is delivered through Lobby CRE’s platform, allowing individuals to create a complimentary account and access all the market benchmarks for each property type and MSA. Users can leverage features like the Benchmark Dashboard for real-time comparison and analysis of property performance against relevant market data.
Download Lobby CRE’s Checklist
In today’s increasingly digital and data-driven landscape, the ability to harness the power of data is essential for maximizing profitability and driving success in commercial real estate. With Lobby CRE’s Market Benchmark Data Checklist, accessing and leveraging market benchmark data has never been easier or more accessible. Start your journey towards data-driven success today by downloading the checklist and revolutionizing your CRE strategy with Lobby CRE.
Looking for next steps?
Reach out to us for a personal demo and learn how Lobby CRE can be the best fit for you.
Additional Resources
A commercial real estate (CRE) property management system, more commonly referred to as a PMS, is a system used by property managers to manage functions such as leasing, marketing, and accounting for multifamily housing. Today, many CRE firms operate with multiple PMS, hindering them from achieving operational efficiencies. This typically occurs when individual properties across the portfolio use different systems, creating challenges when it comes to portfolio-level reporting.
In this blog, we explore the power of consolidating property management systems to drive efficiencies, enable faster reporting, and ensure that your portfolio functions at full optimization.
Why Firms May Have Multiple CRE Property Management Systems
At Lobby CRE, our team has had many discussions with clients, prospective clients, and industry leaders alike about property management systems. Throughout these conversations, we’ve learned that at one time or another (even currently), many firms have found themselves navigating multiple systems. Although their reasons for using decentralized PMS vary, the majority readily acknowledge it as a problem that slows down efficiency and keeps the business from performing at its peak.
The challenges of managing diverse PMS in an expanding portfolio include the increased potential for errors, inefficiencies in data management, and a lack of cohesion in overall property management strategies. Also, differing reporting formats leave no room for “apples to apples” comparisons across the portfolio.
Resistance to change is a common sentiment in industries where established processes and systems have been ingrained over time. Commercial real estate professionals may be reluctant to transition from familiar legacy systems due to concerns about disruptions, potential learning curves, and the perceived risks associated with adopting new technologies. This resistance to change may also contribute to the coexistence of multiple PMS, hindering operational efficiency as teams work within the confines of outdated or incompatible systems.
Property Management Systems: Challenges with Data Silos
Data silos are one of the most common challenges CRE firms encounter when dealing with more than one property management system. When data is scattered across multiple systems and tools, redundancies and inefficiencies are more likely to occur. Tasks that should be streamlined, such as reporting and analytics, become time-consuming as teams are forced to learn multiple platforms, wait for access to tools or reports, and other preventable roadblocks
Data silos can also slow cross-departmental communication. This lack of cohesion can lead to missed opportunities, delayed responses to issues, and a breakdown in overall collaboration.
Finally, compliance with industry regulations becomes challenging when property data is stored across disparate systems. The risk of errors increases, exposing commercial real estate firms to potential legal and financial repercussions.
Three Benefits of Consolidating Your CRE Property Management Systems
Commercial real estate property management system consolidation is not just a trend; it’s a strategic move. By addressing the challenges of multiple PMS and data silos, CRE firms can better reach the full potential of their portfolios, enabling success in a competitive market.
Here are three benefits of consolidating your CRE property management systems:
-
Improved Operational Efficiency
Asset managers are responsible for ensuring success across the portfolio. When property management systems aren’t aligned, it can become difficult for asset managers to keep a tight rein on the business and its performance. Consolidated property management systems make it easier for asset managers to access the data they need at the right time. As a result, they can spend more time focusing on generating reports rather than trying to collect scattered data.
-
Unified Data and Reporting
One of the most significant advantages of consolidation is the creation of a centralized repository for all property-related data. This fosters better reporting and analytics, providing valuable insights that can inform strategic decision-making. For asset managers, the ability to report across the portfolio is critical for effective management. A centralized property management system can be helpful in ensuring asset managers have access to the data that they need for all types of reporting.
-
Faster, Deeper Insights
The speed of the data and insights you receive is directly connected to how timely you can identify and respond to potential challenges or performance issues in your portfolio. Consolidation creates a single source of truth for all property-related data. This centralized approach eliminates the need to gather information from disparate systems, speeding up the reporting process. When all data – from tenant information to financials and maintenance records – is stored in one place, generating reports becomes more efficient. With data consolidated into one system, the chances of errors that can occur from manual data entry or transferring information between different platforms are significantly reduced. This leads to higher data integrity and accuracy in reports.
How Asset Management Software Consolidates Multiple PMS and Data Sources
An asset management solution such as Lobby CRE can aggregate and analyze data from multiple disparate sources – such as property management systems, accounting software, and lease administration platforms. By integrating systems, teams can identify where the data is misaligned and then fill in the gaps.
This type of functionality scales your reporting efforts and equips your firm with easy, quick access to high-quality, accurate reporting. Reports that are generated from integrated datasets represent a more complete view of your information so that you can make accurate decisions.