How to Get Started With Managing Data In Your CRE Organization

Companies create new data every single day. It is vital to the longevity of your business that your company utilizes that data to the fullest. Harnessing your data will give your company the ability to make smarter, data-driven decisions in a fraction of the time it would traditionally take. To begin extracting insights from your data to use in decision making, you first need to manage it. We listed the steps you need to take to get started with managing data in your organization.

Identify & Collect
Managing your company’s data starts with collecting all of it. You will need to find the location of all of the internal and external data sources that you want to use for analysis. This data may live in a variety of places, including spreadsheets, property management systems, or other third-party sources. The trouble with this is that often data that can help the decision-making process is siloed across multiple departments or hard to access from external sources. If your firm has multiple offices or entities in different locations, this further complicates the collection process.

Verify. Process. Standardize.
After collecting all of your company’s data, you need to verify the accuracy and the quality of it. When data is migrated into new systems, it can sometimes be mistranslated. The verification process is a crucial step to ensuring that the data that you spent time collecting can actually be used. Once verified, you need to standardize the data so that it is optimized for analysis. Standardizing your data allows for data to be organized and used for analysis across departments and systems.

Storage & Access 
Once you complete the process outlined above, it is crucial to effectively organize the data so it can be easily searched in the future. When your data is organized, it becomes easier to find the specific data points you need for a particular analysis. You should store your data in a system that allows you to perform quick searches for easy access across departments.

Governance
Proper processes must be put in place to ensure that your data management operates appropriately in the future. To ensure that your efforts don’t go to waste, you’ll need to set governance rules and processes for data collection and usage. Without integrating a governance process into your data strategy, it will be nearly impossible to generate and maintain usable data.

This process is inherently complex but necessary to begin using your data to the fullest. Once you complete all of the above steps, you’ll still need a team of data scientists to analyze your data. This process is time-consuming and very expensive. An easier and more affordable alternative to this process is purchasing a data management and analytics solution. Lobby CRE is a platform designed specifically for commercial real estate companies. It addresses the complicated, expensive, and time-consuming challenges of moving big data operations across platforms and from on-site premises to a cloud environment.

Lobby helps companies discover opportunities in their business and provides actionable insights to make data-driven decisions faster. See the platform live in action.