Real Estate Data Warehouse

What is a Data Warehouse?

• A Data Warehouse is a collection of data that is used for reporting and analysis.
• It can be a small amount of data or millions of records.
• If the reports from your real estate software don’t give you all the answers you need, then you probably export the data into a spreadsheet and create custom reports in Excel. This is when you should consider the need for a Data Warehouse.
• Many real estate companies reach the point where they have so many Excel files that the information becomes hard to manage. That’s when they contact us to discuss building a Real Estate Data Warehouse.

What are some other names for a Data Warehouse?

Some alternate names for a Data Warehouse are:

• Reporting Database
• Datamart
• Operational Data Store
• Spreadmart

Why do Companies Have Data Warehouses?

Companies invest in a Data Warehouse when the effort of managing Excel files is no longer worth it, and because …

• They want fast flexible reporting.
• They have data in multiple systems (and external sources) and need to combine it to understand the whole picture
• They have historical data that needs to be purged from their real estate software, and need a place to store that data
• It is too much effort to manually prepare exported data for reporting
• Have data readily organized enables them be alerted to variances and gives them an opportunity to proactively address variances

What is in a Real Estate Data Warehouse?

A Real Estate Data Warehouse contains the most important “information objects” in your business. For example:

• Tenants
• Leases
• Properties
• Payments Received
• Expenses

See the diagram below for more examples of the contents of the Real Estate Data Warehouse

How Up to Date is the Data?

• Typically a Data Warehouse is updated once a day or more frequently.
• Programs are written that run automatically and fetch the data from the systems you use, for example, your accounting system, leasing system, CRM system, maintenance ticketing system etc.

What are some Data Warehousing Terms?

As you learn more about Data Warehousing, you will come across terms such as:

• Measures
• Dimensions
• Aggregates
• Grain
• Latency
• ETL
• SQL
• Database
• Cloud Storage

Once we start discussing your Real Estate Data Warehouse project, you will learn more about these terms and their relevance.

What is Metric-X’s Real Estate Data Warehouse Service?

Metric-X designs, builds and operates Real Estate Data Warehouses

• We design how the data should be organized so that you can monitor your Key Performance Indicators as well as do analytics to find improvement opportunities
• We build the Data Warehouse by constructing the data base tables, writing programs to extract and load the data, and performing data quality checks
• We operate Data Warehouses for our clients so that they can focus on understanding their business better with the confidence that their reports run fast, their data is reliable, and they can analyze their data from many different perspectives (from the tenant perspective, by property, by property group, by GL Account and so on)

How much data can a Real Estate Data Warehouse hold?

• Data Warehouses can hold millions of rows of data
• For example, some companies choose to have every transaction from their General Ledger saved in the Data Warehouse
• When a real estate company acquires another one, the data from the acquired property management system can also be added to the Data Warehouse. This can be useful for benchmarking and identifying opportunities for efficiency

What is the process of designing a Real Estate Data Warehouse?

• Designing a Real Estate Data Warehouse starts with understanding what you want to do with it
• Companies typically want to analyze vacancy, optimize rent, detect fraud, provide better customer service, manage leads more effectively etc. So we start defining what questions the Data Warehouse will easily help answer
• For example if your leases are in one system and your rent collection transactions are in another system, we will design a way to associate the tenant leases and tenant payments, and property leases and property income so that reporting can be done efficiently

How much does a Data Warehouse cost?

• Here’s the usual answer … “It depends.”
• Cost can range from $2,000 to $20,000 depending on may factors

What drives the cost of a Data Warehouse?

The factors that drive the cost of designing, developing and operating the Data Warehouse include:

• How many systems does the data need to be extracted from?
• How much data needs to be loaded (for example, millions of rows)?
• How much data re-organization is required to make querying and reporting simple?

How to justify investing in a Real Estate Data Warehouse?

In order to justify the expense of having your own Real Estate Data Warehouse, consider the following:

• How much faster can you act on opportunities if you could easily and confidently do the data analysis to evaluate the opportunities?
• How much time do your team members spend importing data into Excel and organizing spreadsheets
• How many different systems is your business data spread out in?
• How much is it worth to you to have a 360 degree view of your customers (or properties, investors,
• How much value is there in having each manager have visibility into his or her Key Performance Indicators (so they can take corrective actions immediately)?
• Are you at risk of losing historical data because you are retiring a key system?
• Have you acquired other companies and don’t want to have to maintain multiple systems?