By Tyler Christensen, Head of Industry Solutions

As Head of Industry Solutions at Cherre, I hear from many prospects and clients that they want to achieve more stable processes, better confidence in their data, and improved insights. All of these are excellent objectives and can be classified by a single term: resilience.

Resilience: The Ability to Adapt and Survive

So what is a resilient enterprise? A resilient enterprise is able to respond to unexpected conditions without putting undue stress on the organization or stretching its resources beyond their limits. A resilient enterprise can adapt, scale, and respond without its normal course of business being disrupted.

Macro and Micro Resilience in Real Estate

Resilience doesn’t just mean handling changing economic conditions like rising interest rates. It also means having the ability to respond to disruptions in normal business processes without significant downstream impacts

Here’s an example of where resilience is often needed:

Asset managers commonly receive data from their third-party service providers, like property managers and fund administrators, on a monthly basis. Many of these asset managers have a process that looks something like:

1. Receive files containing trial balances, rent rolls, and other necessary data via email
2. Open emails and download files
3. Copy data from service provider into internally maintained spreadsheets
4. Map, check, and review data for quality:
   • Consistency: Data is entered in a manner consistent with how it has been entered in the past (e.g. no mapping issues)
   • Completeness: All expected data was received
   • Correctness: All the data is correct (e.g. no missing accruals, no missing leases)
5. Find errors
6. Reach out to service providers for explanations and revisions
7. Go back to step 1 and repeat

A process like this is already difficult and time consuming, so new wrinkles – expanding the information you receive, onboarding a new investment, or a turnover in resources – can create real problems. We call these easy-to-break processes brittle. They’re often business critical and when they break, the impact is acutely felt downstream.

For processes that are already difficult and time consuming, new wrinkles – expanding the information you receive, onboarding a new investment, or a turnover in resources – can create real problems. 

Resilience is also needed for challenges that have an impact beyond the organization. Macroeconomic conditions like rising interest rates, tighter capital, and more demanding investors also require resilience. Not having a clear understanding of how your portfolio compares to benchmarks, interacts with the market, or its overall health will leave your organization playing catch up instead of staying ahead of the curve. Falling behind can significantly impact the organization’s ability to refinance, raise additional capital, and optimize their portfolios efficiently.

Building a Resilient Enterprise

Resilience is more than a state of mind (“This won’t get us down!”). It’s about having the right tools and strategies to face micro and macro challenges. Here are two critical examples:

Build resilience through efficient and automated processes.

This is especially true for processes that move data through the organization. The key is having an efficient and automated solution that ingests information from outside parties, internal systems, and third-party data sources that you work with every day. 

A solution that is efficient and automated should:

• Provide instant feedback to third parties and partners to drive consistency and completeness – before it gets into the hands of your organization.
• Provide transparency into what has been ingested, where the errors are occurring, and overall progress

Build resilience through mastery of the data.

This goes beyond an exercise in master data management. Mastery in this case refers to both control over the data and skill wielding it. 

A solution that drives mastery of the data should:

• Bring all the required data together regardless of whether it is from outside parties, internal systems, or third party data sources.
• Make data easy to access, navigate, and traverse – allowing users to answer questions they encounter every month, new questions they couldn’t answer before, or questions they have never encountered.

How Cherre Can Help

Cherre understands the importance of (and difficulty in) building resilience in an organization. That’s why our platform is built to power resilience.

The Cherre Data Submissions Portal, for example, features a powerful ingestion engine that automates and streamlines the painful process of receiving data from service providers and making it fit for reporting and analysis. Once the data is imported, you can then build mastery over your data through our benchmarking and portfolio health analysis tools. Combined, these solutions empower users beyond automated reporting to better analytics, more powerful insights, and data-enabled decision making.

We love chatting about resilience and data, and would love to discuss the challenges your organization is facing. Schedule a meeting today!

Cherre’s Tyler Christensen is real estate technology strategist, with roots in finance, asset management and portfolio management. As our Head of Industry Solutions, he leverages his data and domain expertise to help our clients build resilient data ecosystems and unlock value from their data.

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• data
• data strategy