Some CRE Firms Will Emerge From This Crisis Prepared For Opportunity

When not addressing mission-critical transactions to weather the Coronavirus crisis, this lull in acquisitions and leasing activity presents a chance for firms to consider how they can best position themselves for the prospects that will unfold in the coming days, weeks, and months. One way to comprehend present uncertainty and prepare for future opportunity is by investing in analytics tools that result in better, faster real estate decisions. But how should real estate firms evaluate an analytics solution? Below, we examine five key features that every real estate analytics offering should address:

1. No decision is made in a vacuum: each real estate decision pulls together information from diverse sources including sales comps, lease comps, newspaper articles, broker intel, government documents, and in-house analysis. Maintaining this interconnected web of information is extremely difficult when companies store their data in disconnected file folders, emails, and Excel spreadsheets. An ideal analytics solution empowers real estate teams to collaboratively gather, update, and analyze all of their decision-critical information together.

2. Firms must be able to keep up with the continuous, real-time stream of updates about competitors, tenants, buildings, and markets. Analytics tools must integrate “live” market updates such as the status of a lease that hasn’t yet closed or an acquisition that fell out of contract. Furthermore, these tools must be able to cross reference this data across companies, buildings, and markets so when data is in the system, it is available and useful at different scales and within diverse analyses.

3. Tools must reduce the time spent creating and sharing insights in order to create easily replicable, rapidly actionable plans. Automating time-consuming, repetitive tasks such as building labor-intensive reports is one way analytics tools will speed up decision-making, enabling firms to evaluate more deals more intensively.

4. Data and analysis must be accessible on both web and mobile to facilitate information sharing both in and out of the office. For example, you should be able to input juicy pieces of market intel you hear from a broker; when the world opens back up, you should also be able to add building tour photos directly from your phone. Yet accessibility is not just where you can use it, but also who can use it — an effective analytics solution provides value for all team members, from analysts up to the C-suite.

5. Finally, solutions must address a key organizational uncertainty — real estate firms risk losing critical institutional knowledge about deals, tenants, competitors, and markets if a long-time team member leaves the firm. Systems that promote continuity of institutional knowledge will ensure a firm’s competitive edge remains sharp.

Although real estate firms face historic upheaval and uncertainty, this is also an ideal time for organizations to strategize about how to weather this storm and prepare for coming opportunities beyond the crisis.

Predictre is an analytics solution that includes these five points and many more. If you’d like to learn more about how you can prepare your commercial real estate organization for the coming wave of opportunity, we encourage you to reach out to us. We look forward to helping you master your markets.