Whiteboard Wednesday – Real Estate Valuations: The Power of Collaboration
On today’s Whiteboard Wednesday, you’ll hear from Arik Kogan, Director of Product Management at MRI Software, as he talks about real estate valuations and the importance of collaboration and openness in software applications. MRI Global Valuations enables secure sharing of valuation information. This allows asset managers, brokers and lenders to have up-to-the-minute data to make informed, effective decisions.
Video Transcription
Arik Kogan: Hi, my name is Arik Kogan and this is a Whiteboard Wednesday about collaboration. At MRI, we talk about being open and connected and allowing technology to eliminate barriers and eliminate restrictions from allowing you to do your business the way you want to do it. This mentality or this focus also makes us think about business processes and various tasks that go on in the real estate market in a slightly different way to more traditional software vendors. Collaboration is a big part of that thought process. Let’s talk a little bit about valuations, real estate valuations, for example.
The traditional process as it relates to real estate valuations is that you have a broker who wants to sell a real estate asset. That broker will communicate with an asset manager to say, “Hey, would you like to buy this building?” They’ll provide all the information associated with that asset. The asset manager decides to buy that building. Then they will request regular valuations from a valuer and appraisal as a third-party service provider. That’s the initial workflow, obviously, this will happen once a quarter, once a month, regular evaluations are going to be coming back to the asset manager. Eventually, the asset manager is going to want to sell that building, the broker then gets involved and the cycle goes on.
Now, this is a nice workflow, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s been like this for a very long time, but the one problem with this workflow is that we’re missing a significant piece of what really goes on out there in the world of real estate investment. That is that this person here needs to feed information to many other people and many other departments and many other functions, for example, lenders. Anyone who’s lending funds to people, either developing real estate or acquiring real estate, are going to want to get the appraisal information. Anyone who’s involved in fund management, for example, is going to need that appraisal information on a regular basis to post their unrealized gain or loss to a balance sheet, to forecast out their market value adjustments.
The list goes on, property management, leasing, marketing, all these functions need information that comes directly out of this process. The problem is that this process isn’t set up for that kind of collaboration. What we’ve done at MRI is, of course, we’ve got a global valuations product that allows you to actually calculate your valuations, but what we need is a solution to enable this collaboration to work efficiently and effectively. We’ve put together a solution that we call SHARE. Analytic SHARE is a solution that allows you to not only seamlessly send data back and forth between these people, but whilst this workflow is occurring, you can track the status of those valuations, you can get notifications about status changes, people can submit comments, people can attach documents. All of that can happen in a single web-based platform that anyone can log into and anyone can access various information according to their role and their security permissions.
SHARE takes care of this particularly well and that’s a huge step above what we’ve been doing in the industry for a long time, which is essentially just sending Excel spreadsheets or other types of files around via email with really no workflow tracking or any kind of integrity. It also takes care of this because those files can also seamlessly synchronize into the platforms that all of these users and functions and departments are using to manage all of their information. The seamless integration of data across all of these functions via Analytics SHARE and our globe evaluations tool means that we’re now leveraging technology to ensure that all of these people stay on the same page and can do their business more effectively.
That is our little Whiteboard Wednesday on the concept of collaboration and Analytics SHARE and globe evaluations. Please contact us if you want a demonstration or you want any more information. We’ll see you next time.