Palace Capital plc are positioned for growth with MRI Strategic Planning
Specialising in commercial property outside of London, UK based real estate investment trust (REIT), Palace Capital plc oversees a range of asset classes, predominantly within office and industrial sectors. With a property portfolio valued at over £280 million, Palace Capital is a growing business which aims to maximise shareholder value through enhancing income returns, reducing void costs and generating capital value through strategic refurbishment and development of assets.
Business challenge
As a rapidly growing business with an extensive portfolio, the team at Palace Capital required a robust strategic planning solution to enable effective and efficient management of their portfolio as well supported their decision making process in relation to their investment strategies.
Processes were clunky and data was siloed across different databases across both the finance and property departments. This threatened the business’s ability to accurately forecast and make confident investment decisions:
“We ran the risk… that information could have been misconstrued or inputted incorrectly.” – Richard Starr, Executive Director, Palace Capital plc.
Additionally, the team were manually creating projection models in Microsoft Excel, which was time consuming, inefficient, and relied on potentially inaccurate data.
Solution
A management and strategic planning solution was needed, so the team set about researching the options available and set on MRI Strategic Planning.
MRI Strategic Planning offered a solution to continually evaluate their extensive portfolio by attribute, model and forecast valuations, and report trends, key metrics, and variances with customised reporting. With transactional simulations and scenario testing, the team has an accurate picture of historical, current, and forecasted performance of their portfolio.
Budgeting and forecasting
The team at Palace Capital are now able to use MRI Strategic Planning to manage budgets and model scenarios, helping to drive smart and informed decision making.
“We are able to model leases, capital expenditure, potential acquisitions and look at disposals and when is the optimum time to sell properties” – Matthew Simpson, Finance Director, Palace Capital plc.
This means that the team at Palace Capital can plan more strategically, utilise budgets more effectively, and add value to the business. Using the modelling tools within MRI Strategic Planning, it’s possible for Palace Capital to measure the profitability of potential acquisitions using lease information, and make informed forecasts on the properties’ accretive value.
Improved Processes
To ensure accurate data and more efficient working processes, Palace Capital now make use of the consolidatory functionality of MRI Strategic Planning. By ensuring all of the data across the business is accessed from a single source of truth, all teams are now working from the same information, meaning the risk of errors and discrepancies appearing or affecting decision making is minimised.
“It is enabling us to use the same processes that our managing agents and our valuers specifically use, so we all know that the data source that we’re all working from is exactly the same.” – Richard Starr, Executive Director, Palace Capital plc.
Positioned for growth
With MRI Strategic Planning, the team at Palace Capital can be confident in their management system, and with a robust solution to support their business are perfectly positioned for future growth.
“We have got ambitions to grow and be a bigger and larger organisation and MRI provides us with that confidence that we can add properties very easily and grow.” – Richard Starr, Executive Director, Palace Capital plc.