BLOG. 6 min read

Harnessing Data into Actionable Insight for Real Estate Managers

August 3, 2023 by Justin Knott

With collaborative insights from Dennis Moore, Senior Sales Executive

Direct real estate investors, owners and operators, managers, wealth and family offices, real estate portfolio managers, and other real estate service providers are experiencing real and ongoing challenges in the effective management of their real estate portfolios—especially as they increase in size and complexity. Managing data from multiple property managers and underlying property accounting systems is time-consuming and introduces a level of risk that is error-prone and creates operational inefficiencies.

Real estate managers need the ability to harness this data and turn it into actionable insights that can help them better manage their real estate portfolio, streamline operations, and provide better visibility and oversight. This helps them ensure their business is running optimally and can support future growth and scale. Based on current market conditions, key person and attrition risk also play a big factor. Attracting, training and retaining the right talent—and providing employees with the right tools to get their work done efficiently—have all become increasingly challenging.

Addressing the Challenges

Today’s real estate operating models are prone to mistakes, and there are opportunities to improve processes and increase the accuracy, timeliness and reliability of data. Real estate service providers can add value by offering a global support model with expert resources that specialize in normalizing data sets coming from multiple systems in multiple formats, applying highly controlled review and oversight functions, augmenting and improving workflow processes, and enabling managers to meet specific accounting and reporting timelines.

This requires the service provider to have experience across a number of jurisdictions, asset classes, regulatory regimes, and legal entity structures globally. Structures can vary from co-investments and open- and closed-end funds to real estate investment trusts (REITs) and special purpose vehicles (SPVs), and asset classes can include data centers, logistics, student housing, office, retail, multi-use, residential, multifamily, infrastructure, industrial, renewable wind farms, solar energy plants and impact investments. Service providers need to be able to offer a flexible services model catered to each of these entity structures and asset classes where fit-for-purpose services, technology and expertise can be implemented on a modular basis to enhance and complement the manager’s current ecosystem of internal and external systems and service providers.

Leveraging Technology and Expertise

Managers and investors manage real estate portfolios as their core focus and competency—they don’t focus on developing technology systems. The additional value that service providers can offer is to deploy the cutting-edge technology and resources required to aggregate and normalize data from disparate systems and sources. This frees up managers to focus on managing and expanding their assets instead of the operational headaches that can come with maintaining systems, as well as attracting and retaining talent to operate those systems. Outsourcing mission-critical asset- and fund-level functions provides managers with resource predictability, economies of scale and access to the latest systems without up-front investment. It can also enable managers to pursue new investment opportunities without limitations or delays.

Benefits to Real Estate Managers and Investors

Utilizing proven services providers to deliver investment-level oversight, reporting and analytics provide a number of benefits to real estate managers and investors—especially as the number of investments, the volume of transactions, and the number of property managers and systems increase, which in turn increases the potential risk for errors. Below are specific areas where service providers can add value:

Analytical review of financial statements to ensure property profitability, and proactively identify issues in a timely manner.
Actively liaise and communicate with asset managers and property managers to understand property activity and upcoming deadlines and deliverables.
Monitor key metrics like property cash flows, occupancy rates and recoverability of expenses to avoid excess expenditures.
Check and investigate month-over-month movements, accounts receivable balances, accruals, and bank reconciliations, as well as analyze property taxes and prepare top/bottom performing asset reports by revenues and expenses.
Ensure leasing agreements cover operating expenses, including identifying leases that need to be renegotiated.
Flexibility to work on client systems and perform functions in or extract data from those systems by being well-versed on a broad range of asset-specific systems in the industry (e.g., Yardi, MRI, SS&C Skyline, etc.), eliminating the need for data conversions.
Improve automation and workflow through the use of innovative/evolving technologies like Robotics Process Automation and Digital Workers.
Leverage experience performing similar services for numerous clients, ensuring infrastructure is in place and implementation can be delivered quickly.
Adaptable service model where the form of the service provider relationship can change over time, to expand services to include more middle/back office functions and more asset classes in line with the manager’s capacity, resources, and willingness to outsource or retain more functions.
Help track and report on ESG metrics and produce presentation-quality reporting for internal and external stakeholder consumption.

How SS&C Can Help

SS&C offers a suite of comprehensive, modular real estate services to a diverse, global client base and has extensive experience supporting the needs of organizations that invest in and manage a broad range of real estate investments across the full spectrum of legal entity structures. Ownership of the entire value chain, from the technology and data centers to the processing infrastructure and personnel, provides SS&C with tremendous control over the quality of deliverables to our clients. We build, own and operate our own proprietary, advanced and scalable technology platforms, and also offer the flexibility to work in our clients’ systems.

The end result is a tailored solution to meet the unique requirements of your business while providing scalability, access to expertise, oversight of your property managers and transparency to your data. As a global firm, SS&C operates with a follow-the-sun processing model to leverage time-zone differences and offer responsive, consistent customer service capabilities in any time zone.

Property Management & Property-Level Accounting	Investment-Level Oversight, Reporting & Analytics	Fund Administration & Fund-Level Accounting
Property-level accounting Aggregation and normalization of data from multiple underlying property managers and property accounting systems (Yardi, MRI, etc.) Oversight of property managers to identify and resolve data quality issues and reporting errors Flexibility to deploy state-of-the-art SS&C technology applications or log into existing client systems for data input and extraction	Augment and enhance existing workflow processes to improve automation and increase operational efficiencies Provide interactive dashboards showing sector, geographic and asset type concentrations Track and report on detailed tenant information, revenues and operating expenses, occupancy rates, lease agreements and property performance A holistic view of the real estate portfolio at the consolidated level, all the way down to the individual asset level Transparency for portfolio managers and investors Track and report on ESG metrics and produce presentation-quality reporting for internal and external stakeholders	Manage the accounting books and records of the fund or other entity structure in any currency Strike NAV on a monthly and quarterly basis Generate and process capital call and distribution notices Wire processing for fund inflows/outflows Investor onboarding, AML/KYC and waterfall allocations Electronic subscription and redemption processing Regulatory reporting, including FATCA, Form PF, etc. REIT testing and compliance Tax reporting including delivery of K1s Secure delivery of all investor documents through an interactive web portal