Exploring Analytics in Real Estate | West Loop Strategy

Insights & Analytics - Real Estate

Focusing on key areas of business and operational efficiency

Making informed decisions in real estate can separate organization that have high rates of return from the ones that struggle. Identifying high-risk applications or high value growth opportunities can make a major difference in your organization. Through reducing the amount of evictions or growing the amount of reliable renters through data, you can save yourself a lot of headache and grow your profits at the same time.

Being able to understand how many applications you are receiving, their outcomes, and their cost or benefit can all be extremely valuable. People who leverage this data have a great understanding into their overall process and how they can improve their metrics. But how are companies and individuals doing that today?

Many companies are spending a tremendous amount of time making and compiling all of this data into reports. Some are unwilling to try because they know the time and cost it would take them to build. An outdated process can take a lot of time out of the day that could be put towards more vital tasks, such as marketing and closing business. Archaic systems can also leave room for human error, as some metrics have to be manually calculated.

Organizations also need to be careful with client’s data. Due to the highly sensitive nature of real estate data, a mis-sent email could result in inadvertently breaking privacy laws like CCPA.

Companies often have little insight into their internal and external operations, such as their property and employee metrics. It is a time-consuming process to calculate separate metrics in the first place. Many companies have no central repository that compares their properties or employees, that would enable them to make intelligent business decisions.

The QuickSight Solution

QuickSight is the perfect solution to real estate business intelligence issues. It enables anyone to easily customize their dashboards to see the right data, automatically updates the data at scheduled intervals, and provides enhanced security. It even allows companies to embed client-facing dashboards into their own applicaiton. This can prove to be another monetization tool for your business.

QuickSight’s easy, powerful, and customizable features allow a dashboard to be an almost exact replica of excel spreadsheets, a favorite for many real estate companies. This makes it a smooth transition for everyone that is used to their old process, while simultaneously eliminating the need to manually calculate any metrics, as it is all done automatically through QuickSight.

Security With QuickSight

When it comes to security and management, everything is set up through QuickSight. By implementing row level security, the company can ensure their clients only get access to their own data. Other companies' and individuals' data are filtered out. Since this is done automatically in QuickSight, there is no need to continually make sure the right people are getting the dashboard. They only ever see what they are allowed.

Updated How Often You Want

Real estate companies no longer have to email clients at the customers’ preferred review period. They also don’t have to wait on an employee to update any metrics. Through QuickSight, visualizations and dashboards can automatically be updated depending on your preferences. Using a tool such as SPICE, companies can automatically update their dashboards every week, day, or hour, without the need for any employee to burn the midnight oil creating a report.

Leverage An Application

If you have an internal application, you can leverage quicksight to allow any client or employee to come into your app at any time they want and see the data they want to look at. If they wanted to look at an older review period, it is as simple as changing the date range in the application, which also means there is no need to store previous excel files. In addition to clearing out clutter, it also allows them to make decisions much quicker. Instead of having to wait until their next period, they can check to see the most up to date data every day.

Finally, QuickSight can give you the flexibility to pick and choose what type of visuals you want for new dashboards. Do you have a vision of specific metrics that you think are impacting your business? QuickSight can highlight that and give you powerful visuals to better understand those metrics. The product is extensive enough that almost any metrics or visualizations imaginable can be created.

West Loop’s Experience

West Loop has worked with multiple real estate companies to migrate their business intelligence unit to Quicksight. A recent project of ours consisted of creating three dashboards. The first dashboard was a replica of their existing excel spreadsheet they were presenting to their clients. The second dashboard was an operational dashboard to give an overview of how each of their properties were doing. And finally, the third dashboard was to understand insights around their internal operations and employees.

Our first dashboard gave the real estate clients a complete understanding of data about their operations. This gives these companies insights into their leases and applications. Metrics include how many leases were approved and declined, what the trend has been over time, and how many fraudulent applications they have received.

Trends also play a massive role in companies' business intelligence. Looking at 30, 60, and 90 day trends across leases and applications allows companies to understand if they have been improving or not. Finally, companies are able to understand why they have declined leases for certain individuals.

The other two dashboards, analysts and operations, are very similar in what they accomplish. Each dashboard was essentially the same, with the difference being whether they focused on the analyst (internal) or the property (external). Being able to see an in-depth view of each of their operations will permit them to tackle problems and improve efficiency.

Metrics such as ‘applications per property and analyst’ and ‘application processing time’ allow the company to diagnose issues and provide assistance if needed. They also wanted to get an understanding of whether their process is improving. To do this, they look at metrics such as ‘how many applications were pending today vs last week’, ‘who has the most pending applications’, and ‘what did each property or analyst accomplish today vs yesterday’.

Our client also wanted to see internal flags for easy wins. These would consist of some well known metrics that could easily be seen and acted upon in that moment. In the old process, this took a lot of digging to get to and that data might not be available until next week when the reports were compiled. QuickSight gives them visibility into what company, analyst, or application is the most important task of the day. Everyday they can come into their application and easily identify and act on the most pressing issues.

Our real estate company also wanted to look at the longest outstanding applications to see the reason why they have taken so long to close. This would allow them to clean up their database and give their properties and analysts better data to work with.

Finally, they wanted to be able to see a map of their properties to see their progress so far and where they were growing rapidly. Being able to see all the pending applications on a map, as well as the year over year increase in applications gives them perspective on how far they have come, and all the work they still can deliver to their clients. This also gives them a great marketing opportunity for new clients.

Embed Into Their Application

Our client can now tell their existing customers that all they have to do is sign into their website. Instead of having to figure out a schedule of when their clients wanted to see the dashboards or having to manage another application, it can all be done at their own discretion. Saving the company and their customers a lot of time and hassle.

Cost-Effective

Built with AWS serverless technology, the system is designed to keep costs at a minimum by only incurring costs when your dashboard is actively being used. This cost-effective solution allows real estate companies to deliver great products to their staff and clients without having to sacrifice performance.

Below are a few key features of the QuickSight Dashboard:

• A supportive workflow guides users through dashboard creation step-by-step, from creating an initial draft to archiving a published dashboard
• AWS serverless technology used for only incurring costs when the dashboard is actively being used. This pricing model allows all of your users to access secure, interactive dashboards and email reports on a pay-per-session basis with no upfront costs or complex capacity planning.
• Embedded within existing applications and all in one place
• Users choose from a wide library of visualizations, charts, and tables. Can add interactive features like drill-downs and filters, and perform automatic data refreshes to build interactive dashboards
• Can publish and visualize all their data in an extremely efficient manner
• Analysts have a self-service business intelligence (BI), so they can answer their own questions, collaborate, and share insights
• SPICE (super-fast, parallel, in-memory, calculation engine) automatically replicates data for high availability allowing thousands of users to simultaneously perform fast, interactive analysis while shielding your underlying data infrastructure, saving you time and resources.
• QuickSight allows you to directly connect to and import data from a wide variety of cloud and on-premises data sources
• Quicksight provides a secure platform allowing you to distribute dashboards and insights securely to all of your users

In conclusion, QuickSight can help a real estate firm keep on top of their properties, clients, and employees all in one place. With powerful visualizations and up to the second metrics, QuickSight is a must for any real estate company trying to stay on top of the game.

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