Property companies' three options for monitoring and reporting

Real estate companies' three options for monitoring and reporting
Now is the time to get your income and expenses under control, and here are your three options to get started.

The real estate industry has traditionally rewarded experience and intuition, but as new technologies in data analytics have entered the field, it places new demands on both employees and organizations at large.

2024 will require data-driven decisions by real estate companies. We know that the market has been in the red before, but the fact is that that was many years ago, and now there are tools to accelerate out of the crisis. Those who pull the handbrake now will spend many years in the future trying to catch up.

1. Manual monitoring and reporting using the real estate system and Excel
2. Purchase a traditional BI tool
3. Using Homepal.

1. Do it yourself using the real estate system and Excel:

Your data is in the systems you use in your business, such as your real estate system, financial system, energy monitoring system and so on. With the right technical skills and plenty of time at hand, this is the first step on a journey to becoming data-driven.

How does it work?

1. Decide exactly what you want to monitor and report.

2. Go into your property system and find the different categories of data you want to see.

3. Extract data from the real estate system to Excel.

4. Quality assure your data. Here you need to make sure that the figures are correct, so that there are no errors in the data.

5. Delete the data points you don't want, cut and paste until you get the metrics that work for you.

6. Create a graph of the figures and compare it with the previous period.

7. Save and share with colleagues and management.

Benefits:

1. No need to buy a new system to get started.

Disadvantages:

1. The process takes a long time and must be repeated for each KPI you want to monitor.

2. Getting data out of the real estate system is difficult and often requires you to write SQL code.

3. Different people do this in different ways, which can lead to the figures also changing from time to time, making them misleading.

4. There is a high risk of human error. A comma in the wrong place can get everything wrong.

5. You are building dependency into the organization, as this process takes a long time to learn and become routine. Follow-up stops when the people who learned this are absent.

6. You need to know exactly what you want to see and how the calculations are made.

7. Visualization will be very limited.

2. Purchase a traditional BI tool

With a standard Business Intelligence tool like Power BI, Insikt (formerly Trimma), or Qlik, you work with consultants to gain insights from your real estate data. This means that you outsource the actual calculations to a consultant for a (high) cost.

How does it work?

1. Procurement of contracts (for municipal real estate companies)

2. Give your new BI provider access to your data.

3. Decide exactly what you want to monitor and report.

4. Send a statement of requirements to your consultant.

5. Wait for delivery.

6. Get back delivery from your BI consultant.

7. Repeat steps 3-5 until you get the result you want.

8. Ready to use. As soon as you want to change something, you must repeat steps 2

Benefits:

1. You can do whatever you want with these powerful tools. Your imagination is the limit.

2. You don't have to do the calculations yourself.

Disadvantages:

1. The fact that it is possible to do exactly what you want is actually also a disadvantage. With infinite possibilities, it's hard to know exactly what to follow up on. There are many different ways to go about it, and most people in real estate companies are real estate people, not data engineers.

2. There is almost always a ping-ponging back and forth between you, the client, and the BI consultant, resulting in a lot of extra work and long lead times (we're talking months between updated deliveries).

3. Every time you want to change something in your dashboard, consulting costs are added. 1300-1400 SEK per hour and consultant, to be more precise. Both from the beginning to get started and get it right, but also on an ongoing basis when you want to change things afterward.

4. To put it bluntly, this option is expensive. It's best suited for real estate companies that have built their own data team and have very strong finances.

3. Using Homepal

With Homepal, real estate companies get automated monitoring and reporting at a reasonable price. Homepal focuses entirely on the real estate industry, unlike any other similar tool.

Homepal's platform includes ready-made dashboards that are tailored to different responsibilities and role-specific needs. For example, if you are responsible for leasing, technical management, regional manager, etc. you can get started with a single click, because we know exactly what you should follow up and look at, and what your management and board want to see.

How does it work?

1. Choose the number of dashboards that suits you.

2. Homepal takes care of the data retrieval and implementation entirely. Homepal pulls data from your property system and any other system you want to share data from.

3. We set up everything needed within a few days of receiving your data. This takes a maximum of five working days.

4. Ready to activate dashboards from our range of ready-made dashboards, or build your own if you wish.

Benefits:

1. You don't need to know exactly what to monitor or how to calculate it thanks to our range of ready-made, role-specific dashboards. We know what each role in a real estate company should monitor and report on to management and the board, so we've done the work for you in advance.

2. You can build dashboards yourself if you wish, but this is not a requirement.

3. We are your partner in your data-driven journey! Unlike regular BI consultants, we give you advice and support, discouraging ideas we've encountered in the past that didn't work and instead sharing best practices from your industry colleagues at other real estate companies similar to yours.

4. You can freely modify your dashboards at no cost, as we have made the interface so user-friendly that you can change it yourself. The only cost is if you want to change something in the underlying data or in your information model, as this requires extra work from our side. However, this is not very common.

5. We answer when you call. Eight people work at Homepal and have a personal contact with us.

6. We have a reasonable price for our license! At least that is what our customers say, such as Drakfastigheter, Stockholmshem, Enköpings Hyresbostäder, Mimer, Haninge Bostäder and Lunds Kommunfastigheter, to name a few.

Disadvantages:

1. You can't do just anything as in "regular" Business Intelligence tools that also support data tracking in e-commerce and retail, supermarkets, fast food chains, industries and consultancies. Homepal are experts in the real estate industry and only the real estate industry.

In summary, which option is right for you depends on factors such as how much time you are willing to spend, whether or not you have a ready-made data warehouse, your budget and your level of technical knowledge in data management. More often than not, Homepal is the right choice.

Want to know more? Book a demo.

Read more:

• Three reasons why you should automate your monitoring and reporting.

• How to go about your rental process according to experts

• Benefits of making property data available to the whole organization