How can you sift through the noise to tap into market intelligence when you need it? What actions can you take to tear down data silos? How are analytics setting a new standard for data-driven precision? What does emerging innovation mean for the future of decision making? 

Earlier this year, we hosted a panel of thought leaders from LaSalle Investment Management, Altus Group, LionPoint and Dealpath to answer these questions in a discussion about the future of data, decision making and performance in CRE.

To learn the most powerful insights from the webinar, read the recap, watch the summary video or watch the full session on demand.

Watch the Webinar Recap Summary

If you’re eager to see the most important highlights from the webinar, watch the recap via the video below.

Elevating Data-Driven Decisions: The Most Important Insights From the Webinar

Below, we recap some of the most important takeaways that were unveiled during the webinar.

1. Doubling Down on Technology Strategies to Achieve Global Economies of Scale

For LaSalle Investment Management, uncertain market conditions offered the ideal opportunity to reset their technology strategy. 

As an industry leader with a global footprint, the firm’s investment strategy is diversified across multiple platforms. Consequently, regional data silos created operational friction. A lull in activity represented the ideal opportunity for LaSalle Investment Management to prioritize technology optimization.

Dubbed “1 LaSalle” and supported by the CEO, this digital transformation project sought to break down these data silos in the pursuit of efficiency. According to Sach Diwan, Global Head of Digital Products, this space offered the firm the time required to centralize its data in a global platform, creating economies of scale. Once market conditions improve, LaSalle–and other firms that seize this opportunity–will be well-positioned to more effectively identify and execute on new opportunities.

See how LaSalle broke down silos and centralized data with a new technology strategy.

2. Delivering Trustworthy AI-Powered Insights With Robust Data Hygiene

Even AI-powered insights are only as strong as the data underlying them. If you lack confidence in your data, can you really scale your investment strategy based on questionable insights?

One trend that panelists observed is a shift away from a “data at all costs” mentality, instead favoring standardized, structured and vetted data. Now that firms are prepared to accomplish more with this data, the need for data governance is stronger than ever–and can prevent the much-feared “AI hallucinations” that could, left unchecked, plague an otherwise sound investment decision. 

Consistency, hygiene and methodology are key to instilling confidence and trust across your organization when it comes to acting on AI-powered insights.

See how to drive your investment strategy with trustworthy, AI-powered insights. 

3. Attracting the Next Generation of World-Class Talent With Modern Tech

At the height of market activity in 2021, many firms struggled to attract and retain talent as they seized unprecedented opportunities to deploy capital. Now, even despite the present stage in the market cycle, competition for top talent remains fierce. While this problem is not unique to real estate, there are ways that firms can adapt to win the talent war.

Real estate’s historically slow adoption of technology means that many job seekers are hunting for tech-forward firms with robust data strategies. Automation reduces time spent on simple, tedious and manual tasks, creating more time to prioritize high-impact work and backtesting. Employees can better leverage proprietary information to inform decision making with data analytics, offering new opportunities to unleash and strengthen their analytical skills. 

From attracting leading talent, to new opportunities for career development and improving employee satisfaction, market-leading technology is key to building and maintaining a high-performing team.

See how firms can win the talent war by pacing ahead of industry innovations.

4. Achieving a True Return on Data Investment

Unfortunately, many firms without a centralized database over-index on collecting data and under-index on analyzing it for decision making. Siloed data is a costly problem that can create process bottlenecks and obscure insights. Similarly, a deluge of data can prove equally as challenging as a shortage–and lacking proper hygiene, can quickly become overwhelming.

During the webinar, Greg Pennington, Manager, Customer Success, quantified the impact of poor data management. For many firms, this lack of clarity and operational inefficiency can lead to both lost transactions and missed critical dates or lost deposits. 

Structured, formatted data based on industry best practices puts the most relevant and impactful data at your fingertips for ongoing analysis. Building a proprietary database of market comparables–based on standards aligned to your unique strategy–ensures that gleaning insights is efficient and scalable. The more users can dig into data points to understand the data’s context and origin, the stronger their conviction will be.

Centralizing data in a global database creates the guardrails your firm needs to avoid these costly errors. By ensuring that every decision is grounded in contextually rich data and you have oversight into every upcoming milestone, you can maximize your return on data investment.

See how your firm can maximize its return on data investment with a structured database.

5. Unlocking Data-Driven Precision With AI-Powered Scale

While AI might never replace a human decision maker, it’s already playing a pivotal role in aiding decision making. In the old real estate game, the proprietary market intelligence a firm could gather was limited by the bandwidth deal teams had to collect it. The advent of AI-powered data extraction tools like Dealpath’s AI Extract eliminated that barrier.

Greg Pennington discussed the transformative power of AI when it comes to amassing market intelligence. Because tools like AI Extract now enable firms to extract data from a flyer or OM within minutes, rather than hours, firms can tap into unlimited comparables while eliminating manual work. Armed with volumes of proprietary intelligence, professionals at all levels can more nimbly slice and dice data to draw powerful insights.

See how AI is setting a new standard for aggregating data intelligence.

6. Pairing a Proprietary Deals Database With Modern Risk Management Tools

The more market intelligence you have to contextualize your decision making, the better positioned you are to outperform competitors. But, that intelligence can only go so far when, in reality, market conditions can turn on a dime.

Comparing underwriting models to understand how a given deal might perform across financial scenarios is a powerful risk mitigation tool. By viewing deal performance across baseline, bull, bear, and extreme scenarios, you can validate that the deal will pencil and avoid costly missteps–even in the most challenging market conditions. 

Layering this risk mitigation strategy together with your proprietary database of market intelligence offers all the context required to confidently make precise decisions.

See how firms are managing risk with granular visibility into performance across multiple scenarios.

7. Enforcing Data Governance as Transaction Activity Accelerates

A slowdown in activity often means that firms have the time and bandwidth to prioritize integrity. But, as transaction activity picks up, continued diligence when it comes to data integrity will yield dividends.

Ray Wong, Vice President, Data Solutions Delivery at Altus Group, underscored the importance of leveraging lessons learned–which can only be accurately captured with strong data governance. A sustained focus on data quality will prevent costly mistakes stemming from dated, miskeyed or otherwise inaccurate information. For some firms, data quality scorecards may be key for ensuring ongoing accountability.

See how strong data governance supports a nimble, scalable investment strategy.

Elevate Decision Making & Maximize Return On Data Investment In 2024

To learn even more about how you can fuel daily decisions and business strategy with centralized data, watch the webinar on-demand now. 

The post Webinar Recap: 7 Key Takeaways on Data Strategy Opportunities appeared first on Dealpath.

From scaling data analyses to automating simple work to predicting performance, the possibilities are endless. But where should CRE investment management professionals even start?

In this blog post, we’ll review five simple tips that you can leverage AI as part of your day-to-day workflow, as well as relevant tools and helpful prompts to get you started.

1. Extract Property or Lease Data With ChatGPT 

Tool: ChatGPT Plus
Goal: Reduce time spent on data extraction
Sample Prompt: Extract property metrics, tenant names, and lease expiration dates into a table

For many professionals, one of the simplest and most effective AI use cases is reducing friction when it comes to data analysis. Streamlining these manual stages creates more bandwidth to prioritize impactful work.

ChatGPT Plus can be used for extracting key property details from documents. You can upload offering memorandums, lease agreements, appraisal reports or another document with data you need. Then, enter a simple prompt like “Extract property metrics, tenant names, and lease expiration dates into a table.” 

ChatGPT will generate a table containing all of this information, saving you hours that you can allocate to deeper analyses. 

To learn how to extract deal data directly into your deal pipeline and build a proprietary deal database with AI-powered Dealpath Data Ingestion, schedule a meeting.

2. Summarize Document Reviews During Due Diligence

Tool: ChatGPT Plus and Google Gemini
Goal: Surface most important information from diligence
Sample Prompt: Create a bulleted summary of key risks, dates, and how they will be mitigated

No matter the deal’s complexity, sifting through mountains of due diligence documents to find what you need quickly becomes a time-consuming nightmare. Instead, rely on AI to summarize key information from diligence findings.

ChatGPT and Gemini can generate summaries of documents such as environmental reports, financial statements, legal contracts and more documents to highlight key points–which might otherwise take hours to find. After uploading the document, submit a prompt like “Create a bulleted summary of key risks, dates, and how they will be mitigated”.

Consequently, you can find the information you need without disrupting your workflow. Before acting on these summaries, though, be sure to validate the underlying facts within the documents.

3. Craft Investment Committee Memos With Quillbot AI

Tool: Quillbot AI
Goal: Draft investment committee memos
Sample Prompt: No prompt required

While only a skilled professional is equipped to pitch a deal to the investment committee, AI may be able to play a role in packaging compelling arguments. 

Quillbot AI is a tool that can elevate investment committee memos, helping your team make the strongest case possible for any given deal. With only an investment thesis, Quillbot can paraphrase existing copy, suggest revisions and generate summaries. 

After editing Quillbot AI’s output, you’ll be on your way to delivering a winning pitch to the investment committee.

To learn more about how to automate collateral creation based on centralized data in Dealpath, click here.

4. Analyze Markets With Google Gemini

Tool: Google Gemini
Goal: Identify recent market trends
Sample Prompt: Provide an analysis of the current market conditions for commercial real estate in the area surrounding the property. Include data on supply and demand, average rental rates, occupancy rates, and any trends in the market.

Your proprietary deal database may be the ultimate tool for market analysis, but AI can also aid in surfacing recent trends that may impact your decisions or priorities.

Somewhat overshadowed by ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini is another powerful generative tool that, notably, can interpret real-time information. For CRE professionals, one use case to consider is relying on this tool to analyze changing markets, trends, news, and data in specific geographies alongside proprietary information.

Whether you need a quick overview of retail vacancy rates in the San Francisco Bay area or a summary of CBRE’s North America data center trends report, Bard can help you factor current events into market analyses.

To learn how investors surface market trends based on proprietary data in Dealpath, click here.

5. Always Specify a Persona  

Tool: All
Goal: Ensure the AI understands the goal of the task and adopts the correct lens
Sample Prompt: You are an analyst at a CRE investment management firm

In many ways, AI tools are fulfilling the role of a member of your team. Across all your pursuits with generative AI, one helpful tip to ensure the AI can execute your exact requirements is to define its persona.

Instructing the AI to take on a specific role within a CRE organization empowers the AI to better tailor its response to your needs. For example, when underwriting, you might instruct the AI to be an acquisition analyst. Or, in the case that you’re writing a summary of recent loans for investors, you can tell the AI to take on the role of Loan Originator. 

Consequently, the AI will be able to adopt that unique lens to best execute on your requests.

What Does the Future of AI in CRE Look Like?

For real estate investment professionals, these recent developments are only the beginning of AI-driven disruption.

While delivering powerful capabilities at scale, AI is still a relatively new technology that carries inherent risks related to data rights, accuracy, data privacy, and other considerations. Before implementing AI tools across your organization, be sure to consider risk mitigation strategies.

The reports, insights and text generated by AI can only be as strong and compelling as the underlying inputs. If dirty data is clouding your digital systems, then reports and insights could result in costly, preventable errors.

As you scale your AI strategy, prioritize trusted, proven software adopted by leading institutions to drive your investment strategies in the rapidly evolving digital age.

How to Evaluate AI for Real Estate Investment Management

With just a few strategically written prompts in your toolkit, you can leverage AI to extract data, draft memos and pace ahead of market trends, all while maximizing efficiency.

As investor expectations for data-driven decision making and team efficiency rise, though, firms with purpose-built AI technology will be best positioned to outperform the competition.

Download our white paper to gain practical, actionable insight into how your firm can evaluate AI-powered technologies to build operational efficiencies and enhance data-driven precision.

The post 5 Simple Tips for CRE Investors Getting Started with AI appeared first on Dealpath.

As the industry continues to undergo a digital transformation, it begs the question: is that really the most important thing? What would you do if you had an extra ten hours per week to prioritize analytical work? Or, to pursue strategic initiatives that are otherwise sidelined by manual work and urgent requests?

The Deal Management Paradigm Shift: Building Tech-Enabled Efficiencies 

According to a 2022 survey, 48% of CRE CFOs expected tech budgets to increase in 2023. 

Invented in 1985, Excel has historically functioned as a catch-all tool in the tech-averse and change-resistant CRE industry. While it remains the tool of choice for modeling, cloud-based databases and project management tools created by world-class Silicon Valley companies are now table stakes for investment professionals.

As purpose-built software solutions increasingly become the norm for CRE firms, industry leaders of all sizes and strategies look to deal management software as a way to both eliminate manual work and act more strategically, at every level.

From real-time pipeline information, to deal documents, transaction workflows and proprietary data analytics, deal management software has become the institutional investors’ command center. Centralizing this information has eliminated much of the manual work that, previously, took a toll on all professionals, from analysts through CIOs. Leveraging data they can trust, these firms can more nimbly outperform the competition at scale.

Deal teams that continue to expend limited resources on manual report-building and intelligence-gathering risk falling behind tech-enabled competitors. In turn, these stone-age firms could forfeit lucrative deals, close deals at a slower pace, or even miss out on fundraising opportunities.

Eliminate Manual Work with Centralized Institutional Knowledge 

Throughout the corporate ladder and the deal lifecycle, deal management platforms like Dealpath offer the intelligence and efficiency needed to make strategy a top priority–instead of information-gathering and manual inputs.

For example, as you ingest deals and add underwriting models, due diligence documents, on-site photos and more in Dealpath, you’re laying the foundation for deal collateral. When it comes time to create an Investment Committee memo, or a DD finding report, you can simply output a document meeting institutional requirements. Where you might have previously entered information 15 different times, you can build efficiencies and create clarity in one source of truth. 

Consider, in another example, the time required for an analyst to find an underwriting model from a 6-month-old Chicago industrial deal to apply the same rent growth and operating expense assumptions. 

What if the analysts on your team could validate your conservative bias by surfacing that model instantly, or report on 12-month averages? Or, pull market comparables from all deals reviewed in the last two years to support your investment thesis when the Managing Director presents the deal to the Investment Committee?

How would you reallocate that time to sharpen future analyses with data at your fingertips?

Slice and Dice Data to Build Relationships and Fuel Negotiations

Building a proprietary deal database with every new deal you review (and reject) memorializes intelligence, making data your competitive advantage. As you win back your time and bandwidth, data at your fingertips can also fuel negotiations and relationship-building.

Think about the leverage you could gain when negotiating with a new broker by showing the sheer volume of deals a competitor sources for you. Alternatively, consider how a VP of Acquisitions might negotiate PSA terms to mitigate risk. Rather than sifting through files to find preferred language in “that lease”, they can instantly surface any deal information–even within PDFs–utilizing Power Search in Dealpath. 

Swift, strategic negotiations can prove invaluable in accelerating late-stage deal flow, particularly when senior management is eager to close. 

Reporting in Dealpath can also open new doors when currying favor with investors. Say that your firm, for example, has recently broken into the Texas multifamily market at the request of sponsors, who are now eager to view a report. Tracking every deal you’ve ever reviewed, a deal management platform like Dealpath eliminates the need to manually compile this information, instead outputting a clean, easily digestible report proving your success. 

Saving the time you might’ve spent analyzing this data means you can instead spend that time by, for example, visiting that sponsor to discuss future funding.

Prioritize Work Nimbly and Supercharge Headcount Efficiency

It happens to all deal teams: you’re in the late stages of the best deal you’ve seen in months, and the lead analyst is out sick. Circumstances like these can leave deal teams scrambling to search for institutional knowledge to extinguish fires; but what if the latest updates were visible in real time?

Pivoting from spreadsheets or one-trick-pony solutions to real-time deal management also creates unprecedented accountability, helping teams more effectively allocate resources. If a team member calls out, then a manager can simply run a staffing workload report to see who is handling each deal, then re-prioritize accordingly. Consequently, you can also eliminate time-consuming staffing meetings and burdensome prep work.

Finally, visualizing this information can also help surface process gaps and bottlenecks, like the need for a transaction manager or an additional step in diligence. Real-time visibility into the latest updates supercharges headcount efficiency, whether you’re leading a 5- or 50-person deal team.

Training Homegrown Talent: Make Everyone a Dealmaker with Dealpath

From accelerating onboarding with standardized task checklists to supercharging evaluations with real-time analytics, Dealpath helps team members at all levels build the efficiencies necessary to adopt a more strategic lens. All the while, you can offer superior career development opportunities with best-in-class technology. Whether you choose to spend that time evaluating even more deals, taking a deeper look at your pipeline or even golfing on Friday, you can outperform the competition with a data-driven strategy and world-class execution.

To learn more about how firms of all sizes are weathering a volatile market and pivoting to emerging opportunities, watch our on-demand webinar.

The post From Excel Jockey to Dealmaker: Prioritizing Strategy and Negotiation appeared first on Dealpath.

To build conviction to act before the competition and close deals faster, deal teams must prioritize the most lucrative pipeline deals while keeping stakeholders informed. Unfortunately, your data is only as valuable as it is accurate. Managing, tracking, and updating data within disparate spreadsheets complicates manual reporting, creating time-consuming work that could yield questionable results. To overcome these challenges in an increasingly data-driven market, modern deal teams have turned to real estate reporting software within a deal management tool.

Managing your firm’s pipeline in a deal management tool creates a significant competitive advantage, unifying deal teams around real-time data at their fingertips. Automating these reports based on programmatic data flow enables dealmakers to make decisions in real time, all while evaluating more deals. Read on to learn about the six reports leading institutional investors automate in real estate investment management software, as well as best practices for creating actionable reports.

• Actionable, Reliable Real Estate Reporting Is Essential in Today’s Competitive Market
• The Top 6 Reports Investors Should Automate With Real Estate Reporting Software
  • 1. Pipeline Report
  • 2. Critical Dates Report
  • 3. Deal Lifecycle Tracking Report
  • 4. Dead Deal Analysis Report
  • 5. Staffing Workload Tracker Report
  • 6. Development Budgeting Report
• More Burning Questions Your Firm Can Answer With Real Estate Reporting Software
• Commercial Real Estate Reporting Software Best Practices: Simple and Scalable

Actionable, Reliable Real Estate Reporting Is Essential in Today’s Competitive Market

Whether you’re screening new deals in your pipeline or searching for data to back your investment thesis, real estate reporting software has become an essential tool. Deal management platforms like Dealpath that track deal data in real time open a new world of possibilities for sophisticated deal teams. Slicing and dicing real-time data analytics makes it possible to turn that data into answers in seconds or minutes–even in the middle of an Investor Committee meeting. 

The right real estate reporting software can make all the difference in how you analyze deals, monitor your pipeline, and mitigate risk as part of your investment strategy. 

The Top 6 Reports Investors Should Automate With Real Estate Reporting Software

What information does your deal team and senior management need to keep a real-time pulse on your pipeline and other strategic priorities? Whether your deal team includes 10 or 100 people, automating reports builds powerful efficiencies, enabling your firm to act with competitive intelligence at its fingertips.

Before selecting real estate reporting software, confirm that the solution can programmatically create these reports.

1. Pipeline Report

The Bottom Line: Pipeline reports provide a snapshot of current deals in progress and where they stand

Because pipeline reports provide a quick glimpse into currently active deals, many teams run weekly meetings based on them. Reviewing key details like deal progress, type, property type, bid date, square footage, price/unit, and financial metrics like cap rates simplifies apples-to-apples comparisons. 

Automated pipeline reports in Dealpath’s real estate reporting software can be tailored to specific stakeholders with only relevant information. They can also be broken down with a secondary grouping, like the region, which is another method of curating relevant data for stakeholders. 

2. Critical Dates Report

The Bottom Line: Critical dates reports provide a high-level overview of upcoming and past action items for deals in your pipeline

Pipeline reports illustrate current deals, but how can you view the work remaining for each one? Rather than digging into each deal to uncover upcoming milestones, many teams utilize critical dates reports to visualize and understand current and future priorities. Building critical dates reports for historical deals can also showcase a typical deal lifecycle.

Firms can assign critical dates for every deal directly to users in Dealpath, ensuring important work never slips through the cracks. 

3. Deal Lifecycle Tracking Report

The Bottom Line: Deal lifecycle tracking reports help you uncover operational metrics to analyze deal flow and adjust investment strategies

Beyond real-time updates, real estate reporting software can also help investment leaders to better strategize and align their efforts by answering questions. How long does it typically take for a deal to move from sourcing to closed, or until the letter of intent is submitted? Does that timeframe vary among retail, multifamily and industrial deals? 

Deal lifecycle tracking reports help firms understand operational metrics related to deal flow, allowing them to identify gaps in their processes and adjust investment strategies accordingly. Some timeframes that deal lifecycle reports should track include:

• Time to close
• Deal creation to LOI submission
• Deal creation to bid
• LOI submission to bid
• LOI submission to contract

In Dealpath, firms can precisely control which metrics are included to build the most insightful reports possible. 

4. Dead Deal Analysis Report

The Bottom Line: Dead deal analysis reports help firms determine which deal types die sooner or more often than others, and analyze why 

As deals in your pipeline move to dead, including a “dead reason” about why the deal died in Dealpath allows you to generate a dead deal analysis report. When your firm’s investment strategy involves a diverse range of property types, regions, and other variables, dead deal analysis reports help you uncover insights about which deals die most often, fastest, and overall, note trends about why certain deals die.

Analyzing dead deals allows your firm to hone in on the opportunities best aligned to your investment strategy. For example, the data might show that retail properties in the Midwest tend to die much earlier than comparable properties in the Southeast. Consequently, your firm can allocate more resources toward properties in the Southeast. 

5. Staffing Workload Tracker Report

The Bottom Line: Staffing workload tracker reports help decision makers understand team workloads to allocate resources and delegate new deals accordingly 

Which team members are currently at maximum capacity? Who can take on new deals, or help other team members with high-priority deals? Staffing workload tracker reports help decision makers to visualize their team’s workload and evenly delegate responsibilities.

If certain deals are approaching a critical date and the assigned team member needs support, managers can find a solution. Including anticipated deal closing dates in this report also helps firms identify when team members will regain bandwidth. 

6. Development Budgeting Report

The Bottom Line: Development budgeting reports help teams maintain oversight into development deals and corresponding costs as projects progress 

Throughout ongoing development projects, new, unanticipated costs often affect projected budgets. Real estate reporting software can help your firm to stay abreast of overages before they become problematic. 

Teams that use Dealpath frequently create development budgeting reports that include total budgeted costs, actual project costs, and the difference, highlighting any discrepancies or overages. Based on these numbers, your firm can adjust its budget accordingly.

More Burning Questions Your Firm Can Answer With Real Estate Reporting Software

Capturing and preserving data in real estate reporting software also presents other new opportunities for deal teams to tap into these insights. Beyond automated reporting, deal teams can also answer questions based on institutional knowledge:

• Relevant comparables: search your proprietary deal database to surface relevant comps based on certain details to compare apples to apples
• Annual deal volume: set quantifiable goals as your firm sources more deals to build even greater investment optionality
• Strongest broker relationships: view your pipeline or closed deals to determine which broker sources the most profitable deals
• Dead deal reasons: capture “dead reasons” for every deal in your pipeline and preserve this institutional knowledge
• Pipeline stage length: identify potential bottlenecks in your pipeline and modify deal processes to overcome them

Commercial Real Estate Reporting Software Best Practices: Simple and Scalable

Leverage Consistent, Standardized Data

Standardizing the way you organize data empowers your firm to analyze information in a more systematic manner. As institutions turn to data-led strategies, managing this in Excel is no longer scalable.

To derive maximum value from real estate reporting software, reconsider which data points are valuable in every deal. Capturing this data ensures that you can create valuable reports that answer all questions, all while building your proprietary deal database.

Use Dropdown Fields To Create Team-Wide Alignment

Dropdown fields can be a powerful tool for enforcing data hygiene, which can otherwise fall by the wayside. Requiring team members to select from designated options eliminates the possibility of misspellings or various acronyms. For example, some team members may classify office properties as “Class A”, while others could input “A” or “CL A”.

With uniform naming conventions, your team can freely filter deal data and group deals in a dashboard or report without concern for inaccuracies.

Seamlessly Ingesting Deals and Capturing All Relevant Information 

Selecting a deal management platform that offers seamless data ingestion eliminates manual data entry, while also ensuring that all relevant information is captured for posterity. This mitigates the risk of inaccurate or incomplete data, which could otherwise hinder competitive intelligence in the future.

Building a Competitive Advantage With  Real Estate Reporting Software

Leveraging every fragment of data your firm collects throughout the investment process is critical for building a competitive advantage, but rarely simple. Real estate reporting software and tools within deal management software can empower you to turn data into answers with real-time pipeline visibility, as well as the ability to slice and dice data in seconds.Watch our webinar to learn how your firm can lead with data at every stage of the investment lifecycle, from sourcing through closing.

The post Real Estate Reporting Software: 6 Reports CRE Investors Can Automate appeared first on Dealpath.

In an effort to deploy capital despite headwinds, many firms have found new opportunities in emerging niche sectors. For example, CBRE’s recent survey highlighted that investors’ preferred alternatives were self-storage and data centers, as pessimism around core markets, like office, persists. Read on to learn how your firm can take a data-driven approach to penetrating new verticals–even without existing institutional knowledge.

The Case for Exploring Opportunities in New, Emerging Asset Classes

Evolving market conditions have forced institutional investors to re-evaluate their investment strategies and, in some cases, put their pencils down. As deal flow has slowed in core markets, though, new opportunities have emerged. 

Rather than wait for smoother waters, some firms have continued to create investment optionality and meet capital deployment goals by pivoting into new asset classes. Evaluating deals in a new vertical is one way to continue deploying capital and grow a competitive portfolio, while maintaining a strategy aligned to your firm’s risk profile.

1. Outline the Ideal State of Competitive Analytics & Intelligence Based on Your Strategy

Even if this is your firm’s first foray into a new vertical, you’ve developed the internal discipline required to strategically evaluate, vet and execute new deals. When planning to penetrate a new vertical, start by considering which real-time data points might be insightful during evaluations. Are there new data points, such as cooling methods for data centers, or total number of units for self-storage, which might yield more comprehensive analyses?

The meteoric rise of real estate data analytics has presented new opportunities for real estate firms to strategically capture and leverage significantly greater volumes of competitive intelligence. With more visibility into potential opportunities, you can take a more data-driven approach to evaluating deals in new verticals.

2. Centralize Data in One Source of Truth 

After developing a data analytics roadmap, the next step is making that data actionable. To act quickly and confidently on new opportunities, nimble deal teams can’t rely on data stored in disparate spreadsheets. Instead, your firm can build greater efficiencies and invest with precision by centralizing that data in one source of truth, like a deal management platform.

Dealpath, for example, creates an ever-growing proprietary deals database containing every OM and comp a firm has ever reviewed. Centralizing this competitive intelligence empowers deal teams to more readily compare apples to apples and find the answers they need as they screen, evaluate and pitch deals. 

Beyond pipeline evaluations, centralizing deals in a deal management platform also allows firms to derive stronger insights from dead deals. Assigning a “dead reason” to every deal offers greater visibility into your pipeline’s performance by deal type, including insights about which brokers source the highest-potential deals. If you have a diligent process for capturing the final transacted price of a deal you passed on, your dead deals quickly become valuable comps.

3. Add Third-Party Data to Fuel your Competitive Intelligence 

All too often, third-party data can fall by the wayside as formatting challenges complicate real-time analyses. However, purchasing and adding third-party data about new verticals to your deal management platform can be another quick route to quickly developing competitive intelligence.

Instead of relying exclusively on third-party data, which creates the risk of acting on outdated information, utilize it to supplement the first-party data and your own underwriting findings. In doing so, you can develop stronger benchmarks with data you know you can trust. 

4. Automate Reporting to Keep a Real-Time Pulse on Your Pipeline 

As you source new opportunities, maintaining a real-time pulse on your pipeline is key to uncovering the most profitable deals. Automating reporting in deal management software keeps everyone on your deal team apprised of pipeline activity on a minute-to-minute basis. It also frees up the time your team would normally spend compiling detailed pipeline reports, allowing them to focus on higher-value activities like new vertical research. 

Automated reporting allows your team to make real-time investment decisions, share vital information and remain aligned on priorities, despite a lack of historical market knowledge.

5. Grow your Pipeline by Seamlessly Ingesting More Deals 

Exponential pipeline growth empowers your firm to strengthen investment optionality, particularly as you build efficiencies in evaluating new deals. However, scaling your pipeline should not put the onus of additional data entry on your deal team. Instead, find a trusted, vetted and proven deal management partner that offers data ingestion services.

Eliminating manual data entry from your deal team’s workflow empowers them to evaluate more deals, while also reducing the risk of human error. Consequently, your firm can begin evaluating new deals immediately, rather than waiting for highly paid analysts to complete this admin work.

Leading With Data: 3 Reporting Tips to Fuel Your Digital Deal Advantage

In a fast-paced, increasingly data-driven real estate market, investors with the conviction to act sooner and close faster are positioned to win. Watch our on-demand webinar to learn how your firm can outperform the competition by centralizing institutional knowledge in one place, evaluating and closing more deals.

The post Breaking Into a New CRE Sector: The Data-Driven Approach [Guide] appeared first on Dealpath.

In recent years, real estate investment managers have transacted at a higher volume and velocity than ever before. Ever-growing access to data–and powerful new platforms to harness this competitive intelligence–have played no small role in this transformation. Armed with real estate data analytics software driven by proprietary data, investors are systematically underwriting and evaluating with greater speed, scale and precision using deal management software. Now, investors can screen deals in as little as minutes–a lengthy process that may have once taken hours.

In this blog post, we’ll outline how deal teams are turning data into answers by breaking down the 5 key insights and value drivers behind real estate data analytics.

Jump to:

• What Is Real Estate Analytics Software? Understanding the New Age of Proprietary Data
• 5 Key Insights to Uncover With Real Estate Data Analytics
  • 1. Real Estate Comparables Data: Transactional Data, Rent Rolls & Other Proprietary Information
  • 2. Owned Portfolio Data Analytics
  • 3. Pipeline Performance Analytics and Strategic Insights
  • 4. Market Data Analytics & Intelligence
  • 5. New Real Estate Market Intelligence & Data Analytics
• The 5 Key Drivers of Modern Real Estate Analytics in Property Technology
  • 1. Standardized Data
  • 2. Access to Real-Time Data & Insights
  • 3. Integrated Third-Party Datasets
  • 4. Data Ingestion Partnerships
  • 5. Automated Reporting
• The Proptech Companies Powering Commercial Real Estate Analytics

What Is Real Estate Analytics Software? Understanding the New Age of Proprietary Data

In short, real estate data analytics offer investors new ways to visualize data intelligence to make faster, better-informed underwriting and investment decisions.

It takes significant time to collect, maintain and analyze data–time that’s better spent evaluating more deals and scaling deal flow. Real estate analytics software, like deal management platforms, are simplifying how deal teams tap into this intelligence, whether they’re making equity investments, evaluating development projects or originating debt deals.

As institutional investors manage their pipelines, real estate investment analysis software programmatically adds corresponding deal data to an ever-growing proprietary database. Fueled by historical comps, real estate data analytics platforms allow firms to screen and underwrite deals with greater speed and precision–making data a key competitive advantage. Real-time visibility empowers investors to act more confidently based on up-to-the-minute information in a market where the fastest players win.

5 Key Insights to Uncover With Real Estate Data Analytics

1. Real Estate Comparables Data: Transactional Data, Rent Rolls & Other Proprietary Information

The more deals your firm ingests into its pipeline, the more comparables you’ll have when evaluating future opportunities. Investors now rely on data analytics for real estate to harvest intelligence from underwriting models, like rent rolls and transactional data, faster and more precisely. With seamless access to actionable data, you can scale your pipeline to create stronger investment optionality and surface more deals.

Centralizing and visualizing this information in a deal management platform allows you to systematize data-driven investment decisions by slicing and dicing data from a reportable deals database, informing underwriting assumptions. Even deals that die immediately can offer benchmarks in the form of comps, priming your firm to make data-driven decisions on future deals. Dealpath’s deal management platform includes an integration with CompStak, allowing your firm to seamlessly access key sales and lease comps.

Whether you’re screening a new deal, underwriting an opportunity or validating a deal to the IC, real estate data analysis tools offer the intelligence and confidence you need to act. 

2. Owned Portfolio Data Analytics

Beyond passed and dead deal data, how do current pipeline deals measure up against your owned portfolio assets? Deal teams managing their pipelines in deal management software now compare underwriting models from current opportunities against owned assets. 

In just a few clicks, you can evaluate deals against portfolio benchmarks to see if they meet your target risk and return profiles. Marrying owned portfolio analytics with proprietary market data can fuel a powerful digital deal advantage. 

3. Pipeline Performance Analytics and Strategic Insights

How are deals in your pipeline performing? Are deals sourced from certain brokers or in specific markets closing faster? These questions–which might have previously imposed hours of spreadsheet work–can now be answered via turnkey reporting.

As you execute and reject deals, real estate data analytics within deal management software can provide strategic insights about your investment strategy’s performance. For example, running a dead deal analysis report might confirm that industrial deals die more frequently than multifamily ones. Or, that office deals in Atlanta rarely move beyond screening. 

Understanding your investment pipeline’s performance is critical as your firm strategizes to accelerate deal velocity and deploy capital efficiently. 

4. Market Data Analytics & Intelligence

In today’s fast-moving market, there are better ways to stay abreast of trends than reading industry newsletters. Monitoring real estate data analytics, driven by pipeline data, will enable you to uncover and act on trends in real time. Consequently, you can beat the competition to the punch when it comes to pursuing emerging opportunities in fast-growing niches.

With Dealpath, for example, your firm could slice and dice data to monitor trends for all deals in Seattle, or drill into multifamily properties. If cap rates began dropping, you would be well-positioned to act on this intelligence before competitors.

5. New Real Estate Market Intelligence & Data Analytics

New markets like life science and self storage hold boundless, untapped opportunity. Penetrating these verticals, though, can be challenging without a foothold. Lacking a trove of historical comps, data analytics for real estate can empower your firm to surface and execute the most profitable deals.

Marrying paid third-party data with proprietary pipeline data from deals you’ve sourced can bring your deal team up to speed quickly on industry benchmarks. Despite a lack of market experience, your firm can deploy capital on deals matching your risk profile with conviction.

The 5 Key Drivers of Modern Real Estate Analytics in Property Technology

Commercial real estate data analytics can take the form of various real estate investment software categories. Across the board, though, insightful analytics that make systematized real estate investment deal analysis possible hinge on key value drivers.

1. Standardized Data

A departure from the previous norm of storing data in various spreadsheets, standardizing data as it’s ingested has become the new norm. Additionally, standardization enables firms to immediately make apples-to-apples comparisons. For example, standardizing the format for purchase prices on multifamily properties creates the opportunity to pull a report of pipeline deals based on that data point. As a result, firms with the right platforms can analyze deals in a more programmatic, scalable manner. 

2. Access to Real-Time Data & Insights

How can you confidently evaluate investment decisions based on outdated benchmarks? Centralizing data in real estate analytics software ensures the entire organization, from analysts, to senior leadership and even portfolio managers, can find accurate information in real time.

3. Integrated Third-Party Datasets

Integrating third-party datasets with your proprietary analytics can add valuable market context. Real estate analytics platforms position this crucial data alongside proprietary data, centralizing all relevant intel in one command center. When considering options, be sure to select a solution with an open API, which makes it possible to aggregate data from other platforms.

4. Data Ingestion Partnerships

While every new deal your firm reviews offers valuable intelligence, capturing that data can be challenging. Working with a real estate analytics software solution provider that offers a data ingestion partnership, though, ensures that your firm memorializes intelligence from every deal in your pipeline–even the ones you reject immediately. Consequently, your firm can more easily slice and dice data by market, deal size and other variables to surface relevant comps.

5. Automated Reporting

Traditionally, pipeline reporting is a time-intensive endeavor that requires collaboration and significant data entry. Real estate data analytics platforms like Dealpath have shifted this paradigm, instead allowing stakeholders to keep a real-time pulse on pipeline activity with automated reports. Armed with information tailored to their roles and responsibilities, deal team members and leadership can act faster and more confidently.

The Proptech Companies Powering Commercial Real Estate Analytics

As commercial real estate’s digital transformation continues, proptech companies are ensuring that firms have streamlined access to the information they need. While there are many more, these are some of the proptech companies powering commercial real estate analytics:

• Dealpath: real estate’s most trusted deal management solution that empowers institutional investors to grow top-line revenue and build operational efficiencies with real-time visibility.  
• Real Capital Analytics: a CRE database with over $40 trillion in recorded commercial property transactions providing investment management firms and other organizations with actionable data about market pricing, capital flows and investment trends
• Compstak: a crowdsourced platform that provides  commercial lease comps, sales comps, and property details to simplify investor decisions
• Cherre: a data platform allowing firms to connect disparate data sources
• Altus Group: a leading data company serving the Canadian market with real-time and historical transactional data, comps, and local market tools
• CoStar: a leading data company serving the U.S. market with extensive comps and transactional data, as well as other data and information products

3 Strategies to Boost Deal Velocity And Grow Your Portfolio of AUM

Closing even a few more deals each year drives meaningful portfolio growth. But to act on deals before the competition, your firm must build data-driven efficiencies when identifying, vetting and proving these investment opportunities. Download the eBook to learn how institutional investors close deals with greater speed, precision and conviction by leveraging purpose-built deal management software.

The post Real Estate Data Analytics: 5 Key Investment Insights & Value Drivers appeared first on Dealpath.

Why Real Estate Databases Are Critical for CRE Institutional Investors

Commercial real estate databases offer deeper, better structured market intelligence that might not be readily available through other channels. They often feature sophisticated analytical tools that allow you to understand data in new and intriguing ways. Tapping into this data guides your investment strategy to help you identify profitable opportunities. 

With a commercial real estate database, you’re in a stronger position to detect market patterns, pinpoint trends and work efficiently. In short, commercial real estate databases allow you to screen deals faster and more strategically, ultimately propelling your business forward. 

What to Look For In A Commercial Real Estate Database

At the most basic level, a commercial real estate database needs to be able to source critical industry information firms use to guide investment decisions. Data must not only be accurate, but also reflect real time changes. Your team can’t spend their limited time manually inputting or updating information. 

Analytical tools within real estate investment software are also critical, as they allow teams to draw conclusions that fuel an investment strategy. Being able to seamlessly recall past deals or related comps will greatly speed up the analytical process and allow you to make comparisons with ease. Furthermore, the ability to filter down for a more granular view of relevant data relevant to your current objectives is vital.

Your commercial real estate database also needs to integrate with other tools to facilitate seamless communication and visibility. Centralization is a must, as it allows you to review multiple different datasets against the opportunity you’re considering.

Top 8 Commercial Real Estate Databases

Dealpath 

How effectively your team digests and derives intelligence from commercial real estate data impacts everything, from the deals you pursue to your portfolio’s growth. Strong data alone won’t suffice; you need analytical tools to guide your investment decisions.

While not a data product, Dealpath is a powerful deal management software that enables teams to source, standardize, and leverage commercial real estate data for deeper insights. Through intuitive filter-based analytics, you can instantly recall past comps and deals, screening new pipeline opportunities in minutes. Real-time reporting ensures that you can keep a minute-to-minute pulse on your pipeline and uncover the most profitable opportunities. Leveraging Dealpath, Dermody Properties grew its portfolio of assets under management by 400% by building operational efficiencies.

Altus Group

The best commercial real estate research tools provide a window into historical deals for your target markets. These insights can guide day-to-day investment decisions, while also expanding on your understanding of wider market and investment trends. 

Altus Group is one of the leading real estate data companies for the Canadian market.  Composed of Altus Data Studio plus Reonomy, this platform gives investors access to real-time and historical transaction data, comps, alongside monitoring tools for local markets. These data products are a great asset for investors looking to back their moves with reliable third-party data.

CoStar

CoStar is a leading commercial real estate database covering a wide range of property sectors. As the market leader in the U.S., CoStar’s robust platform includes extensive comps and transactional data. CoStar also offers a range of other commercial real estate data and information products that can augment each aspect of their real estate business.

CompStak 

The more comps you can look to for context, the better you can vet real estate deals in your pipeline. 

CompStak takes a crowdfunding approach to building a commercial real estate database by collecting comps straight from the professionals working at leading commercial brokerages and appraisal firms. Their crowd-sourced model is unique in that it requires you to give comps in order to access comps. This standardized, rigorously vetted data then becomes available to other investors researching their target markets.

CompStak is integrated with Dealpath, so Dealpath users can seamlessly log into Compstak to review comps alongside pipeline deals. 

Real Capital Analytics

Much of the commercial real estate data investors use concentrates on ongoing deals, historical information, and market analytics. Real Capital Analytics delivers on these critical fronts, but also offers vital market information about investors, key players and transactions.

Real Capital Analytics is a commercial real estate database that allows you to dive deep into market transactions as well as the individual investors behind deals. Users can discover property owners, attributes, debt terms, and more. 

Esri

Financial data is at the heart of every real estate transaction, but it’s hardly the only information that should inform your investment strategy. Population and area demographics add invaluable context when vetting your investment thesis. 

Esri is a mapping and analytics platform providing data for a variety of different industries, including government, transportation, and more. Real estate investors can harness these insights to enrich their analysis and capture additional details that financial data might miss.

Cherre

All too often, compiling data from multiple systems of record can quickly become inefficient and limit the insights available. Today’s investors need a way to bring data from across their business–including investment, asset and portfolio data– into one place for more holistic decision making. 

Cherre is not a traditional commercial real estate database. Instead of providing property and market information, this platform aggregates different data sources into a single platform. As a result, decision makers across the organization can analyze data through a more holistic lens to measure performance and strategize. This is an effective way to close the feedback loop for siloed functions within your business. 

Preqin

There are times when you need to go beyond the essentials to truly pinpoint a promising investment deal. By reviewing current and future commitments on a property, as well as funding plans, you’ll be able to draw deeper insights than with just standardized commercial property data alone.

Preqin is used by professionals operating in a wide range of industries for commercial real estate data, future investment plans, fund searches, as well as individual and institutional investor profiles.  Armed with additional datasets, your firm can dig even deeper into commercial real estate deals.

Systematize Data-Driven Decisions With Commercial Real Estate Databases

Capitalizing on the latent value of your commercial real estate database calls for modern tools. Download this e-book to learn how a deal management software can empower your data-driven decision making and propel your business forward.  

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