Real asset and private equity firms are expanding their core investment strategies to include real estate as a means to balance risk and achieve consistent, longer-term returns. This means that in addition to fund accounting and administration solutions, they will also need property management accounting and reporting solutions. Even if the fund hires third-party firms to manage its properties, it still needs a system capable of rolling up the operations and accounting metrics from those properties into its fund accounting and general ledger systems to create reports for stakeholders and regulators.
A number of funds are also involved in real estate and infrastructure development projects. Where this is the case, project costs must be tracked, consolidated and rolled into their fund accounting system. This can become burdensome, as fund managers that own even a small handful of real estate assets or development projects can have multiple income statements and balance sheets that must be integrated into their fund accounting financial reports.
Build assets not IT infrastructure
Fund managers investing in real property want to concentrate on their investments in real asset infrastructure, not IT infrastructure. That’s why more companies in this space are considering outsourcing all or part of their real estate and fund accounting processes to service providers that offer these software applications. However, outsourcing fund administration and property management accounting to separate application service providers can defeat the purpose. It then becomes the responsibility of the funds’ IT team to make sure the third-party property managers’ data is being properly consolidated and fed into the property management reporting system, which in turn, feeds into the fund accounting system. What you don’t want, is one outsourcing service provider for property management reporting, one creating the financials and another working on fund accounting. The ideal situation is to have all three applications, end-to-end, under the roof of the same service provider.
A better strategy
SS&C SKYLINE, a recognized standard in the property management industry, provides robust property and lease management, accounting, and reporting functionality for commercial, retail, residential and mixed-use properties. Although these solutions are offered as an on-premise or hosted solution, we can provide these solutions and processes through its fund administration outsourcing services.