The Competitive Advantage of Data Ownership In Commercial Real Estate
In this On-Demand Webinar, CEO of Lobby CRE, Anne Hollander, and Global CTO of Defiance Digital, Kevin O’Dell, talk data ownership and the importance of being able to access and utilize your own data in order to extract actionable insights that will help you grow your portfolio. Watch the webinar, here, or keep reading to learn more.
Ninety percent of the world’s data has been created in just the last few years. This statistic sounds absurd until you think about devices like your cell phone and your laptop and take into consideration how they are constantly creating metadata with every picture you take, every text message or email you send, and even everything you buy online. When we translate this to the commercial real estate (CRE) world, we think about satellite imagery, census data, leasing data, occupancy percentages, delinquency, expense data, and so much more. Each day in the CRE space, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created, but this information isn’t useful if it’s just sitting in a database. Data alone doesn’t intrinsically have value — it only becomes valuable after it’s been put into action. This begs the question: “How exactly can I utilize this data?”
Data Ownership
The first step of leveraging your CRE data involves making sure that you actually own the data that is being created from your properties; this ensures that competitors can’t manipulate or hide the data from you. If you don’t own your data, someone else could be aggregating it, anonymizing it, and reselling it to profit from your private business. Many property management systems capture your data and store it for you, packaging it up in different ways that you may or may not have consented to. They then silo that data in a way that you cannot freely access it. These systems may also work with vendors who sell tools that will repackage that data and charge you to access a rolled-up version of it. The accessibility of your data is the number one indicator of ownership. When you give up access to your data, you’re giving up your ownership rights to data that you can leverage in order to improve your portfolio’s growth and efficiency.
The Competitive Advantage of Data Ownership
If you can’t access your data, if someone else owns your data, or if your data is just sitting in a storage closet – you cannot drive value from it. When you’re working from a dataset that competitors can’t manipulate, however, you gain an immediate advantage. If you control your data, you have the ability to tailor it, compare it, and then visualize it in order to extract valuable information. For example, you can look at your property data side-by-side and do variance comparisons across the portfolio to see which properties are performing the best and which ones are falling behind. Then you can look at leasing reports, delinquency reports, foot traffic, and the number of tours given in order to identify the reasons why that property is falling behind and find a solution. Another advantage that comes from data ownership is improved efficiency. If you automate your data ingestion pipelines, you can count on a constant flow of data that is always available, accessible, and reliable. You gain the ability to move away from spreadsheets, which leads to less human error and greater speed to insights.
How Lobby CRE Can Help
So, where does an organization get started with regards to leveraging their data? It begins with analyzing and visualizing property performance and understanding the data in relation to one another. This includes visualizing trends and tracking key metrics. You want to be able to understand how things are changing in the market in order to identify trends, opportunities, and risks. Lobby CRE helps you take control of your data and visualize it within a platform that makes it easier to compare your data side-by-side, understand that data, make better informed decisions, and eventually get to a point where you can model future scenarios and prescribe the outcomes you’re trying to achieve.
Want To Learn More?
Watch our On-Demand Webinar – “Data Ownership in CRE” to hear more about how to effectively secure, control, and analyze your data in order to grow your portfolio and improve its efficiency – or request a demo of Lobby CRE so you can see our platform in action.
