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BUSINESS SOLUTIONS
Real Estate Intelligence: How Software is
‘Eating’ the Real Estate Business
Mark Sigal
Managing Director
BrightStreet Ventures
Netscape founder (and successful VC) Marc Andreessen is designed with non-technical users in mind.
once observed that software was “eating the world,” It combines four elements: A) rich visualization experiences; B)
that technology was moving into industries that once
seemed immune from disruption. Gone are newspapers, record meaningful ‘data sets’; C) push button controllability; and D) drill-
stores, bookstores, video stores and down capabilities.
Radio Shacks.
These drill-down capabilities allow the
Change is in the air. Amazon is swal- user to traverse effortlessly from the dash-
lowing up Main Street. Uber is transform- board view of pictures and charts—down
ing transportation. Apple and Google are to the very documents (e.g., leases, invoic-
heralding the age of mobile, data-driven es and communications flow) that power
computing. Whether you are in Retail, these different data sets. The term we
Commercial or Residential Real Estate, have for this is Dashboards to Documents.
an essential truth surrounds you: you are
either riding this wave…or getting swept Needless to say, for such a system to
up by it. work, it needs to be able to accrue lots
of data and lots of documents. This store
This article presents a new approach to of data will grow every day, so the data
real estate portfolio management called Real Estate Intelligence needs to be warehoused.
that embraces this new wave. Real Estate Intelligence is built on A data warehouse layer is central to Visualization Intelligence,
three cornerstones. and also to the two other cornerstones—Reporting Intelligence
and Work Flow Intelligence.
Visualization Intelligence Reporting Intelligence
Visualization Intelligence is the first cornerstone. The idea that Reporting Intelligence is built to address an ugly truth. In the real
drives Visualization Intelligence is the notion that you can’t estate business, far too much of the daily world still operates in
improve—and you can’t manage—what you don’t measure. the realm of Excel Hell.
In very few clicks, the CFO of a shopping center developer By Excel Hell, I mean that for real estate portfolio owners
can determine if and operators, too much information is spread across too
the occupancy many custom spreadsheets, running on too many different
costs of a given users’ machines. Making matters worse, spreadsheets are
merchant are continuously being updated, often by software ‘macros’ that
materially above glue together multiple worksheets in a workbook. The same
comparable workbook is then shared across all of accounting, making the
merchants, and as notion of a ‘version’, and dealing with ‘version control’ a peren-
a result, deter- nial human resource drain.
mine if there is a
risk of default. Or, quickly identify property expense categories If this sounds a little bit like the automobile factory assembly
that are growing materially faster than the benchmarks for other line, that’s because it is. Too many hands have to touch the same
categories. numbers over and over, wasting time and attention, and giving
rise to all sorts of errors.
Simple idea, but achieving this level of relevant analysis is
much harder than it sounds because in most real estate organi- Reporting Intelligence flips this model on its head. It envisions
zations, the consumers of information are non-technical. They’re a world where core data is properly warehoused, solving the
not data scientists; they’re property managers, accountants, versioning and data integrity issue. Because of this integration,
leasing agents and company executives. Thus, the new approach creating new report formats is more template-ized, making
changes and updates less surgical in nature.
48 Realcomm
