The commercial real estate (CRE) industry is changing. For decades, investors have used their intuition and traditional, retrospective data to make decisions, but industry dynamics are forcing firms to reevaluate their processes and strategies. Externally, the market is experiencing CAP rate compression and CRE investors are facing increased competition for assets and fundraising. On top of that, the Covid crisis has challenged the status quo. Within firms, there is a demand for new strategies as investment committees look for more consistent evaluation criteria. They’re focused on finding different ways to use and share data that will increase efficiency and, ultimately, profitability.
Prepare Your Teams for the Future of CRE
Some real estate investors are enthusiastic about the possibilities of incorporating new data sources into their decision-making processes, but run into difficulties deploying them across their organization. They need to ensure that their entire organization can access, share and benefit from a wealth of data, analytics and insights.
The first step that leadership teams can take to maximize ROI from these new tools and data is to invest in their people and processes. Specifically, they can:
- Use technology to harness internal and external data
- Upgrade talent with new skills, training, education and more strategic hiring
- Evolve processes to incorporate new tools and data
Make Data-Powered Decisions that Save Time
The need for efficiency and profitability resonate with every industry, and real estate investment is no exception. Powerful platforms are helping organizations shift from an era of “people-driven” workflows to “data-powered” teams that can do things faster and make decisions more quickly. Investing in technology that enables organizations to harness internal and external data gives teams the ability to prioritize their most precious resource: time. Giving teams the technology to be more efficient accelerates their ability to evaluate and execute deals for greater firm profits.
CRE firms are already starting to fortify their talent pool with employees who know how to leverage data. Gone are the days of spending hours on the phone to source information and then collecting and combining ad-hoc data from a seemingly endless series of Excel spreadsheets. Decision-making processes are evolving to incorporate new, cost-saving tools for faster deal screening, easier modeling, and more streamlined preparation for investment committee meetings.
Gain a Competitive Edge
With more companies entering residential, competition has necessitated a new way of doing things. Investors need new processes, new ways of evaluating data, and a more nuanced approach for making decisions. The Covid pandemic has only accelerated the need for new information and data systems. Migration, changes to where people live and work, and demographic shifts have driven the need for real-time insights that are essential to good decision making.
With more capital in the system, there’s even more competition for every deal. Firms seeking to validate assumptions with traditional data sources are often bogged down by data that is hard to access, interpret, and share. Accessing unique, granular, real-time data can make a significant impact, providing a different perspective than competitors. For example, a more accurate rental rate forecast can give investors a big advantage on understanding which deals to move forward on and how to finance them, as well as save time that might be spent collecting multiple, often conflicting forecasts from existing databases.
Markerr Empowers Real Estate Investors
What does all of this mean for the industry? It means that the current way of doing things is siloed, people-centric and time-consuming and that new technology with new data are required to meet future challenges. And it means the commercial real estate investor of the future will need to be able to use data (and data-powered tools) to be more effective.
Markerr was built for real estate decision making. By bringing together data reflecting income, employment, hiring, consumer spend, migration, and property-level transactions, Markerr transforms raw data into actionable, real-time insights that are not available anywhere else. Our data is highly granular, connected at scale and can easily be made available across our clients’ entire organization. We have a variety of delivery tools to accelerate our clients’ workflow in easy-to-consume formats.
At Markerr, we’re providing commercial real estate investors with the data-powered systems they need to get an accurate, forward-looking view of demand and supply. We’re ready for the data-powered future of commercial real estate.
