How to Stop Letting Crucial Real Estate Intel Slip Through Your Fingers

How many real estate companies proclaim data is their competitive advantage?

Yet beneath the glossy investment presentations, how much of that competitive edge is stored in a disorganized web of emails, team members’ memories, and disconnected spreadsheets saved haphazardly on a hard drive?

Does your data strategy look more like a FBI suspect wall than a cohesive, intentional program?

Does your data strategy look more like a FBI suspect wall than a cohesive, intentional program?

Unfortunately, the way real estate firms store their data means decision-critical information slips through the cracks more frequently than we’d like to admit.

To illustrate this point, maybe this sounds familiar:

You’re underwriting a deal and know that a team member analyzed a few properties in the same submarket three months ago. Unfortunately, that colleague left your firm last month and you have no idea where she saved those market notes, sales comps, and lease comps.

Could it be in…

a) Her now-deleted email inbox?

b) Somewhere on the company’s share drive?

c) The pile of papers on her empty desk?

This is a classic case of institutional knowledge loss that is pervasive throughout real estate firms.

Once you find this data, you not only have to re-create the intel she gathered and cleaned, but you’re unsure what data is missing that could have a significant impact on your analysis.

Keeping spreadsheets of sale comps and lease comps is insufficient to capture and unlock each company’s collective market intelligence. It’s the electronic equivalent of piling more pieces of paper on your desk without connecting the data points together.

In fact, to ensure your company is getting the benefit of all your information, you should use a system that layers together all of the data and intel that you’ve gathered about buildings, submarkets, markets, competitors, and tenants.

With Predictre, you can easily consolidate, visualize, and run analytics on all of the information that your team utilizes to make investment decisions: from sales and lease comps, to market intelligence gathered from conversations at happy hours and baseball games.

Michael Pearce