Reporting and its Remarkable Rewards for CRE

You’ve just got a new job. Congratulations! As a brand new building operations manager, you might not know the complete ins and outs of Commercial Real Estate (CRE) but hey, you’re passionate about the industry as a whole. Your eagerness to learn should carry you through.

Then comes the dreaded first request: ‘Can you pull together a report on our current deals pipeline? It should include key dates and some metrics to analyse deal flow.’

You quickly discover the data’s not all in one place. Information on different types of deals is on disconnected spreadsheets. Some guesswork might be involved in connecting the data - but you’re up to the challenge.

Then you realise some data points are near-impossible to access in the records!

As you try to sift through it all, a dreaded thought dawns on you: even if I manage to pull this information together, how will I identify the right insights to create a coherent report from it?

The harsh reality is that, even in 2024, it’s not straightforward to go from gathering data to reporting to actionable intelligence. Actionable intelligence is the single most important aspect of successful CRE leadership and decision making.

At Nexudus, we’ve spent nearly 12 years understanding the science of reporting and how it can be customised for every sector. Here’s what we think good reporting can (and should) do for CRE.

Get the basics right, out of the box.

If you don’t have a reporting tool built into your operations, you’re likely to struggle. A good reporting module should be able to quickly access data from within the organisation, negating the need for manual effort.

Such a tool should also act as a business intelligence framework, plugging into your records and spreadsheets to automatically extract relevant information when required. This negates the need to keep the system up to date at all times.

Similarly, there should be flexibility built into the reporting tool, allowing the user to see key information at a glance, whilst being able to dig into key data points with more nuance. A good overview can quickly identify gaps and allow you to remedy them when putting a report together. This also eliminates any guesswork from the process.

Ensure trustworthy, shareable data.

We’re not big fans of guesswork. Accuracy quickly becomes a gamble when reports are created using disconnected data, in different spreadsheets. We encourage operational teams to not utilise data they’re not 100% confident about.

Consider the request for the deals pipeline report in the intro. Pipeline reports should provide insight into active deals, the type of deal and any financial metrics associated with. Adding key dates to these reports helps teams prioritise better, create timelines, determine staffing requirements and budget around these opportunities.

If information about your active deals isn’t up to date, or the type of deal has not been accurately maintained into your systems, it can create a disbalance in staffing and budgets - resulting in inefficiencies and rising costs.

We believe the best way to combat this is to have one common tool that connects all your key data together, even if it’s in different systems. Using an API-first approach can ensure all your data gathering systems are connected to each other for the most accurate, up-to-date reporting.

Such a common tool will also allow operational teams to collaborate and easily share metrics between teams. This saves both the time and effort your team might be spending putting together separate presentations, with differing numbers, in favour of something more centralised and accurate.

Show you the big picture.

Inaccurate data can hinder your ability to properly understand risk and assign resources. Similarly, a reporting system that doesn’t allow you to see a complete overview will hinder your ability to easily connect dots and gather insights.

A strong reporting tool should offer pre-built templates and dashboards to let your teams automatically pull data based on the most requested reports.

In fact, in 2024, we believe a reporting tool that supports simple language queries (“I need the square footage of each unit for deals in progress”) should become the norm. It should allow you to supplement big-picture data with granular insights from your records and then visualise the whole thing: charts and graphs for every collection of data points.

Yes, that’s right: a visual element built into your reporting tool, to make insights more accessible and easy to absorb at a glance.

Start making intelligent, data-led decisions.

Whether built in-house, or developed externally, a reporting tool is a must for your enterprise. It should be complex in its ability to access and automate key aspects of your reporting, but simple enough in UI, allowing you to engage with it using plain language queries and turn your data points into beautiful charts.

At Nexudus, we’ve been perfecting our platform’s reporting capabilities to allow users to do just that.

Our platform allows CRE teams to integrate their default reports, excel sheets and disconnected data points into our platform, with a set of advanced analytics tools to make sense of it for them. We also offer an API-first solution to plug into any system of yours that handles data, allowing your teams to utilise Nexudus Explore.

Nexudus Explore offers limitless reporting capabilities, from custom templates to on-demand insights and perfectly visualised reports. If you would like a tour of how it works, reach out to the team today for a fast, free demo.