In real estate investment management, effective reporting and data management are essential for making informed investment decisions, attracting investors, and ensuring compliance. As critical as these two factors are, they come with more than their fair share of challenges, many of which are intertwined, further complicating the problem.
The answers to these challenges can be found in technology solutions that streamline and ease the reporting process, allowing you to make the most informed decisions. Below, we’ve identified the top five of these challenges, as well as what to look for in a solution to overcome them.
1. Siloed data
Investments often involve different property types, multiple partners, and complex investment structures, resulting in data scattered across various spreadsheets, documents, and systems. This data is oftentimes even further fragmented across departments, which complicates your ability to gain a comprehensive view of your investment portfolio and can lead to errors and inefficiencies.
As a result, one of the primary hurdles in reporting is trying to manage siloed data. How you achieve alignment and clarity in your data is the real difference-maker.
The answer: Look for a platform that centralizes all of your data into a single platform. This allows you to access, manage, and analyze your data from a single source while being sure that you’re seeing accurate, up-to-date information. This consolidation eliminates data fragmentation and provides a unified view of your investments that can be accessed quickly and easily.
2. Accurate data
Accurate data is the key to making sound investment decisions and staying compliant with reporting requirements. Real estate data can be intricate, with updates and changes happening constantly and coming from multiple sources. Many times, important edits are being made at the same time by different people in different roles on a variety of different spreadsheets or files. This increases the potential for inaccuracy in data entry or outdated information. And both can lead to costly mistakes and do serious damage to your firm’s reputation.
The answer: Choose a platform that employs automated data validation and reconciliation processes to ensure accuracy. Additionally, look for one that integrates seamlessly with a wide range of data sources and systems to minimize the risk of manual data entry errors. Finally, real-time data synchronization will keep your information up to date.
3. Time
Generating comprehensive investment reports can be an incredibly time-consuming task, particularly when dealing with large portfolios, multiple stakeholders, and varying data sources. The administrative task of creating reports manually not only takes valuable time but the tedious aggregation of multiple pieces of information from varying sources also increases the likelihood of errors.
The answer: To make this process much more efficient, teams should look for software that can automate the creation of reports quickly and efficiently. A platform with a library of report templates and the capability to customize and automate tasks like quarterly asset management reports will save your team hours of digging for data in disparate sources and formats. This will ultimately allow them to focus on strategic tasks that add value to your portfolio.
4. Routine, repetitive reporting
In many cases, a particular asset may have a variety of stakeholders each with unique reporting requirements. Whether that’s equity investors, lenders, developers, institutional investors, or other entities, each of these stakeholders may have its own specific reporting needs / preferences, which can create challenges around time to create, data location, data accuracy, and other factors.
The answer: Because these required reports are repetitive in nature and can oftentimes be automated, teams should use a software platform that can automate these reports to free up time for more specialized or custom reports (see below).
5. Specialized and custom reporting
Routine reporting is most often predictable, allowing you to plan out your time to perform it. However, there are instances where one or more stakeholders may want a report that isn’t so predictable. This is where the “fire drill” mentality comes in, where oftentimes an analyst has to scramble to find the right data for that report, verify its accuracy, separate out the pertinent information, and create the report. And these are often highly time-sensitive reports, which only complicates matters.
The answer: The good news is there is software that can simplify what would normally be stressful, time-consuming tasks. In many cases, these solutions can generate these time-sensitive custom reports at the push of a button – while also ensuring the data is accurate and up to date.
Real estate investment reporting presents several challenges, most notably siloed data, accuracy issues, time-consuming processes, multiple stakeholders with unique reporting requirements, and the lack of access to custom reporting. The best way to address these challenges effectively is to look to technology, specifically a solution that centralizes data, automates reporting processes, ensures data accuracy, and provides options to ease custom reporting. Choosing a comprehensive solution that aligns with these criteria allows you to make the most informed investment decisions and thrive in a competitive market.
Long story short, you don’t have to let reporting challenges hold you back from success if you invest in the right tech to unlock your full potential in real estate investment management.
