Asset Manager Property Database – Why You Need One

The commercial real estate industry has been drowning in a sea of documents for decades. Spreadsheets, Word documents, as-built surveys, title policies, income and expense reports, rent rolls, and of course email, email, email. Turns out, Realquantum’s research found 82% of those in commercial valuation roles are dependent on a manual, spreadsheet-driven process. It’s a problem reported by BOTH small businesses AND big enterprises.

Unfortunately, this model requires a lot of tedious, manual effort and lots of reviewing. Clearly, it’s easy to make mistakes – especially when all it takes is one formula in one cell. This all wastes time and a creates a ton of email in the process. Worse, all that effort from all those experts creates many valuable insights. But, they’re all trapped in documents!

There needs to be a better way.

Local Data, Global Access from Boston to Beijing

Asset managers need to create value from all their data. How? That’s done by getting it all in the same place, in the same format. As a result, they can curate their own rich local data. In a robust asset manager property database, it will provide secure global access. Everyone on teams large or small will have knowledge at their fingertips to make data-driven decisions. So, here are some use cases depending on the function within an asset management team:

• Research Center
  • Access sales listings, offering memoranda, costs, rents, expenses, cap rates and more at a detailed level. Specifically, this includes the asset manager’s own properties and comparables they collected along the way.
• Valuation
  • Use a property database that follows industry best practices. For example, the OSCRE Industry Data Model for managing the real estate life cycle. Link all the properties to every valuation analysis performed inside or outside the firm. They are linked to valuations of any sort from evals to full appraisals over time all in one place. Ensure the database follows the valuation best practices for CRE valuation including PUCS (Property Use Classification System) from the Appraisal Institute and C-MISMO, the commercial standard from the mortgage industry.
• Underwriting
  • Quickly study similar properties in your portfolio to compile an investment offering.
• Investment
  • Asset managers regularly get offering memoranda on potential investments. Once in the database, they provide a rich source of information when comparing deals and analyzing portfolios.
• Tax
  • Locating tax comps and identifying tax appeal opportunities.
• Property Managers
  • Consolidate property data such as photos, title info, as-built drawings, surveys, Cap Ex, etc. Really, anything that would be in a deal room. Apartment managers can document inspection notes and photos collected via mobile app.