By Kevin Mattice, Chief Product Officer

You’re barraged by real estate data sales pitches every day. Buzzwords like AI, Moneyball, or Bring-Your-Own-Data Visualization layers.

But you rarely hear about implementations that drive ROI. That’s because most sales pitches are bullsh*t: The pitch looks exactly like what you wanted, but in reality the product is not what you needed at all.

A Hard Truth: The Magic AI Solution Doesn’t Exist

Even if a magic AI solution existed, it would be overblown, expensive, and timely to execute. And it’s not even what you really need.

You need to know:

• What assets you own and where
• How those assets perform against the market and your budget/underwriting
• How to speed up decisions for investing and divesting in assets
• How you can grow your AUM and deal flow without growing headcount

You need a data insights and integration engine that serves as your single source of truth, to answer any question – including ones you haven’t thought of yet.

Winning Takes More Than a Database

Real estate data is disparate, incomplete, siloed, and fundamentally incompatible. Your data does not speak the same language, and you need more than a database or data pipelines.

24/7 monitoring, alerting, and maintenance 

You can’t afford to be offline. Comprehensive monitoring of your entire architecture is essential to ensuring that your front-end products, models, and reporting continue to power your business.

A system that supports every department 

How are you ingesting and egressing your data? You need an architecture that can support multiple API sources, different types of file delivery (like CSV and Excel), and direct database connections. 

Mastery of a complex real estate data model

Untangling the web of real estate data is an exercise in riddle-solving.

• Property data: Valuations data, your leasing data, your debt data might all tie together at the building level, but deal flow data is tied to a portfolio and transaction data is tied to the parcel.
• Market data: Demographic and market analysis data might be measured by Zip code, sub-market, or census tract.
• Ownership data: Large corporate entities purchase properties under very different, abstractly named LLCs that are deliberately obfuscated. 

Connected data from external partners…

To get the most out of your data strategy, you’ll need to integrate data from benchmarking, POI, transaction, and economic providers – plus deal, valuations, modeling, loan, risk management, property management, and ESG applications throughout the lifecycle of your asset. And each one has their own data dictionary and schema. 

… and internal sources

A centralized data strategy works only if everyone uses the same data. Ensure your architecture supports the entire investor lifecycle, from disposition to acquisitions to value enhancement. 

Standardization services

You need one set of standardization services across all of your data, including addresses, names, and geospatial aggregates.

(Pro-tip: Cherre has built the largest Real Estate Knowledge Graph that we use as the fabric for our data connection engine. We’re one of the few companies who have a view of the entire world of real estate data in a single data model.)

How to Get What You Need (Build Versus Buy)

Don’t waste resources on something that isn’t your core competency. No real estate company has driven higher returns because they excel at data engineering.

Yes, building a data engine yourself is certainly possible – if you have a limitless budget and timeline. 

Sourcing engineers and product managers to get your data to a point where you can drive meaningful value across the organization can take years and millions of dollars — and those resources could be better spent building strategic differentiation.

Maintaining your data infrastructure with 24/7 internal support is not a strategic differentiator.

Paying for data providers and licenses is not a strategic differentiator. 

Reinventing the wheel as you continue to evolve your architecture is not a strategic differentiator.

The differentiator comes from the analysis and insight you drive with that data.  

There’s a Bright Future Ahead With Cherre

At Cherre, we don’t cut corners. We sort, normalize, and resolve all your data within a safe and secure infrastructure – for a fraction of the time and cost it would take to do it on your own.

Un-Bullsh*t Your Data Strategy

Cherre has helped the world’s leading real estate companies unbullsh*t their data strategies, powering $2.9 trillion AUM for our customers. 

Schedule a demo to learn how Cherre can un-bullsh*t your data strategy, too.

• Tagged as:
• CRETech
• data
• Kevin Mattice