Data is the lifeblood of the real estate industry. From comps and cap rates to leasing data and market trends, data is at the heart of any real estate decision. The success of an investor or developer, therefore, depends on the quality of that data. That’s why structured deal data has become a necessity for the real estate industry.
Unstructured deal data, on the other hand, is one of the biggest liabilities for a real estate investor. Unstructured data is located in disparate file folders, documents, emails, and on-premise servers. One of the biggest issues with unstructured data is the sheer time it takes to track down information. According to one study, office workers now spend an average of 9.5 hours every week gathering and searching for data.
Even once you find it, the data may or may not be out of date. Managing competing data from different sources and tracking down documents in archived file folders isn’t just a waste of your time, it can put the very integrity of that data in question.
The rise of structured deal data has been one of the biggest developments in real estate over the past several years. With the advent of cloud-based deal management tools, investors are using software to collect and automatically organize critical deal data.
To leverage the power of structured data, start by identifying what type of data you need and where that data resides. Do you need address-based demographic data and property details? Tenant and leasing information? Economic trade area data? Pay particular attention to the data you use most often for analysis and reporting.
Next, identify reliable sources of that data, whether it be from a third-party service provider, in-house research, or your own industry sources. After you collect the data, the key is to bring it together in a format that you and your team can easily digest and manipulate.
Once you have the necessary data, leverage software to do the heavy lifting. Modern deal management technology automatically organizes and structures your data in a cloud database. It’s instantly searchable and retrievable, and crucially, is always up to date. With your data structured and easily accessible, you are free to focus on higher-level analysis.
One of the core tenants of Dealpath is that centralized, structured deal data is essential to the work of the modern real estate investor. If you’d like to see firsthand how Dealpath intelligently structures your data in a cloud database, we’d be happy to give you a custom demo of the platform.
