Data
Integration Challenge... My Digital
Lease Tracking Dispatch (September 20) focused on web-based
lease administration applications. But as one of my portfolio manager friends
pointed out, lease admin is only part of the problem. How
do you get that information into your property management program? How about developing a capital improvements budget? And
how can you compare actual rents with a current market survey? In
other words, for maximum value, you need to integrate data from many
applications.
Here's
his story: "We recently migrated our accounting / management and
reporting software to [Brand X], a Sequel-server-based product. We customized it to provide a level of
asset management reporting we thought critical. Then
we created a lease-abstract model in Excel to assemble the data for
each lease in our portfolio, which is then uploaded into [Brand X]. The
lease abstraction process and data input / scrubbing was both tedious
and costly and is still a time-consuming aspect of our lease administration
process and on-going data input into [Brand X]."
 By
coincidence, Eric Forman,
President of REsolve Technology,
recently took me through a WebEx demo of REquest, his web-based system
for asset and portfolio management. We
looked at a portfolio of different types of properties in multiple
states. You could roll up and sort data by property
type or geography based upon data extracted from many different types
of applications -- property management, lease analysis, MapQuest, custom
Excel spreadsheets, etc. This is a powerful way to analyze a portfolio. But building such a customized reporting
capability is a daunting task, and it requires ongoing maintenance
(as the underlying programs evolve). Translation:
it's expensive. Digitizing
the real estate workflow will require years of investment, training
and effort. I sure wish that it were easier!
--Peter
Pike / ppike@pikenet.com |
