Real-Time Relief
Of course, multifamily technology managers are the ones caught in the middle of this data tug-of-war. D. Thomas Figert, director of information technology at Dallas-based BH Management Services, a third-party manager of more than 32,000 units, strives to find a balance in the information he provides against the resources it takes to do so.
For instance, the firm has been focused on deploying Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Yardi Systems Voyager property management software, a process that Figert says is now about 80 percent complete. “One of my challenges has been to slow down on the reporting capabilities until we get the product fully deployed,” Figert says. “At some level, it comes down to costs, but largely, it’s just resource-related. I’ve only got a finite number of staff.” One way Figert and BH have addressed that challenge is by updating reports they’ve generated in the past for new requests.
“We will often get a request for a report that puts particular emphasis on a specific value,” Figert says. “If we can direct them to a similar [existing] report that basically has the same thing, it saves a lot of time.”
But providing real-time data also has upsides. At Lane Co., an Atlanta-based third-party manager of more than 30,000 units, chief information officer Dan Haefner says the firm makes information available to its clients through a password-protected extranet, a process that has saved the firm time and energy it would spend generating reports.
“After years of doing owners’ reports that were stacked 8 feet high, we decided to use the technology to give our clients access to their data, in real time, at their convenience,” Haefner says. “Now, the process is way skinnied down. The value-add is the technology and process improvement coupled together. How do you assign an ROI to that?”
The answer is, you can’t. And for fee-based managers and technology providers who serve institutional clients with tens of thousands of units nationally, whether they should be providing real-time data to their clients may become less and less of a question over time. The reason why? Those investors are simply demanding that they do so. And ultimately, they’re the ones who write the checks to get it.
“From a third-party perspective, I don’t believe you can be competitive without offering some kind of real-time reporting,” says Scott Wilder, vice president of national residential property management at Lincoln. “When you go in there to pitch your business, what you’re really doing is selling your technology. That’s what they’re interested in. They want to know what you can do, how you can report their data, and how often you can do it.”
–Joe Bousquin is a freelance writer in Newcastle, Calif.
How to Avoid Drowning in Data
1 Strive to provide real-time data, but balance it against the larger needs of the organization. You might not be able to respond to every unique request until your technology is fully deployed.
2 If numerous report requests do bog you down, try to provide existing data that addresses the same, or a similar, area. Remember, reports are content. The more mileage you get out of any one report, the more time and money you will save down the road.
3 Give clients access to data through an extranet. While this can generate even more requests for data, it pares down the time it takes to create non-automated reports.
