The Institutional Real Estate Inc Sponsorship brochure, Connected-Investor Focused, We connect people, data and insights, sponsorship, events, IREI Products
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NAREIM DIALOGUES SPRING 2017 23 for a whole lot of real estate managed by many different general partners and property management companies. They simply don't have the bandwidth, and often not the technology, to deal with extracting the data they need from their real estate partners. Like general partners, limited partners need global portfolio reporting with data from all the assets pulled together, along with the ability to drill down from this birds- eye view to look more closely at individual problems and opportunities. The trouble is not only collecting and organizing this data; it's also about timeliness. Asset managers commonly receive the portfolio information they count on 60 to 90 days after the end of a particular quarter – far too slowly for disciplined oversight and agile decision-making. With general partners watching over property performance, and limited partners keeping an eye on the general partners, what's needed is a means of pulling together dispersed data so it is presented in a consistent, comprehensible way for the use of everyone who needs it. This relieves asset managers of the task of wrangling data on their own so they can spend more time on analysis rather than creating silos of data that's of limited use to others. DON'T COUNT ON THE PROPERTY MANAGERS The property management company's job is fine-tuning property operations and generating maximum profit and asset value, not governance and data aggregation. While of course you can expect to receive monthly data and reports, property management companies operate best when using the property management and accounting software they have invested in for their organization rather than a mandated system. "Property management software simply isn't designed to aggregate and deliver data for analysis, or to have external data imported into it," says John D'Angelo, managing director of global real estate advisory firm RealFoundations. "Its control environment and functionality are designed for property managers, which make it terrible at meeting the functional and data needs of asset managers and their analysts." The secret to working with great data is to not place your hopes in property management companies delivering it when you want it, in the way you want it. Instead, be specific about your data needs and use software now available that can help collect and aggregate data from the field and package it for general partners and limited partners in a timely fashion, in the specific form they've requested it. Many general partners and limited partners are still struggling to shape data into the form they need because they're unaware that software could be doing the job for them, or are hesitant to take on the task of getting such a solution implemented. They continue to spend valuable time working directly with the property management companies to have data sent to them the way they want it, and it generally arrives in a form that can't be used as-is for analysis. Asset managers often spend a significant portion of their time working with spreadsheets and other tools to manipulate data for use in their particular jobs instead of actually using the data for analysis.