In this era of digital business, ‘data’ is considered priceless wealth. It’s an important resource which provides businesses with the necessary insights, visions, and suggestions to take on new approaches, continually innovate, and make more informed decisions which benefits everyone in the mix – in case of real estate, from the property owners, landlords, and tenants to real estate agencies, agents, stakeholders, and what have you.
Data harmonisation refers to a process where data is selected from a variety of sources, such as internal operations and external interactions as well as day to day business activities, where the relevant information is synthesised to make it qualitative and easily connect between the different sources.
This has become a necessary practice for all businesses today, particularly those operating in real estate, where hundreds to possibly thousands of transactions may take place within a span of a few days. Data harmonisation in real estate allows for a meaningful data set which can then be analysed extensively to uncover hidden trends and useful insights to boost business operations.
Every business, and not just those in real estate, has a large block of data containing untapped opportunities. Since that data arises from multiple sources and devices, the quality obtained is not always qualified and, therefore, cannot be used in any real or meaningful way.
At this point, data refining techniques are needed (such as data harmonisation for real estate) when combining the different sources to ensure that the data has quality and consistency. Qualified, consistent, and accurate data is the foundation of conducting effective data analytics and business intelligence, in addition to other techniques like machine learning or artificial intelligence – to help businesses identify opportunities and, thus, make accurate and informed decisions. Many a times, this can give one real estate business a notable competitive edge over another.
In real estate, gaining a competitive and dominant edge in your local market can often mean having the ability to capture and utilise the right data. The following is a very generic example of how data harmonisation for real estate works:
Identify all the various micro data sources. Collect them to form a unified dataset.
Clean and harmonise that data set by identifying any duplicated, inconsistent or generally unusable data. Modify or remove the necessary data to keep it clean, consistent, and uniform.
Check the overall quality of the data, eliminating any inaccurate data in order to ensure its integrity and validity.
Identify and choose the appropriate variables in order to continue harmonising the data.
Process and pool the data into a centralised sharing system, enabling all departments within your real estate company or organisation to assess and use it, as per their needs, objectives, or purposes.
As mentioned earlier, proper data harmonisation in real estate is necessary to perform advanced analytics. If you use the right tools and approaches for data harmonisation (for real estate or any other industry), then you can easily combine disparate data sources in order to ensure that you are indeed working with “apples to apples” and the fact that all that data is making sense. A truly reliable piece of software such as the Harmony app can help solve all kinds of variations between file types, data types, as well as data field and column naming conventions – which are some of the key attributes to work on while harmonising your data.
In a 2021 survey, IBM reported that poor data quality can lead businesses to lose a jaw-dropping $3.1 trillion each year. The main factors to blame were system outages, decreased productivity, and higher maintenance costs – all due to the poor quality of data the businesses were working with. When making multiple decisions on a day to day basis, especially in an industry like real estate, there is a lot at stake, and so, your business processes hinge on having good data inputs and outputs at your fingertips.
By harmonising, cleaning, and normalising your data, you make it manageable, usable, and trustworthy. You can make informed decisions based on it, which can benefit all parties across the board. When you have a trusted tool to use in data harmonisation for real estate, you will start to see incredibly positive results, including:
Through accurate and complete data, your property account and marketing teams, for instance, can identify specific patterns and execute better demand planning, campaigns, and product launches as a result, and with far more confidence. They’ll know which properties to market or where or where demand is higher for a specific kind of property according to the local demographic in that area.
The combination of various data sets and integrating them on an “apples to apples” basis means everybody on your team will have access to a centralised version of the truth which they can always rely on – from your estate agents to your property managers to your in-house builders or architects, and more. This can dramatically speed up collaboration and the pace at which things get done.
Clean, accurate, and reliable data can be a very powerful tool when it’s put to work the right way. As more of your real estate team sees its potential, everyone will be encouraged to trust and adopt it universally, thus, benefitting the entire organisation.
Robust data management processes allow for massive volumes of data to be synthesised accurately and swiftly. Once this data is prepared using the correct protocols and parameters, your IT or accounts team, for example, won’t need to reorganise everything or translate it again when they acquire it from your area, site, or in-the-field teams.
When trustworthy data circulates throughout a real estate organisation, it underpins effective data governance, leading to a more streamlined business model where data privacy and protection regulations are always complied with.
When you have a bedrock of precise, reliable, and clear data to base decisions off, everyone from your real estate agents to your accounts and marketing teams to your stakeholders can build the necessary scaffolding for smarter business strategies, which can also significantly benefit the end user and, therefore, will make your property business a more reliable and trustworthy one.
It’s not too hard to see how harmonised data can provide the foundation for smart and more informed decision-making throughout your real estate organisation. When all your data is in a unified language that everyone can understand, you can easily leverage it for off-the-charts analysis, reporting, and business intelligence.
Good in, good out!
In early 2022, a collaboration between two leading industry standards laid down the groundwork for digital transformation in the real estate and smart building sector. At the centre of it all was data harmonisation for real estate.
The Brick Consortium and RealEstateCore announced that the two groups would work together to make it easier to create rich semantic models of smart buildings as well as real estate portfolio.
Digital transformation at scale in the real estate industry is currently proving to be very challenging, both within and across organisational boundaries – with one of the key challenges being the number of competing smart building metadata standards. Although these standards tend to have major overlap in features they are not directly compatible. This has made it rather difficult for building stakeholders to exchange crucial project-related data and for application developers to fully support all the underlying building systems.
The Brick Schema and RealEstateCore standard currently represent two of the leading metadata standards when it comes to smart buildings. Both have collaborated over the last couple of years to create overlaps and make it simpler to translate between the two standards.
Over the last few months, these efforts have accelerated where extensive work has been undertaken to harmonise the two projects, leading to a new, more clarified metadata solution – effectively removing the need to select between either Brick Schema or RealEstateCore.
After completion, the two standards are meant to be complementary as they have been redesigned to work together. Instead of modeling a building through only RealEstateCore or Brick, for example, the new solution will see buildings being modelled using the best of both worlds – so, in essence, the best parts of RealEstateCore and Brick.
Let’s attempt to demonstrate this with a practical example:
When conducting semantic modelling for a building, a piece of HVAC along with its associated parts and sensors may be modelled using Brick, while the HVAC’s location and building’s lease, along with other key real estate attributes might be modelled using RealEstateCore. This scenario was only made possible because both the standards leverage a shared semantic web foundation which enable the collaborative use and interoperability of their ontologies for any given building’s model.
Representatives from both standards worked collaboratively to identify the various areas of overlap, so that they could better understand which parts to retain within each standard.
According to Erik Wallin from the RealEstateCore Consortium and Gabriel Fierro from the Brick Consortium, the RealEstateCore and Brick Schema standards offer the ‘best of both worlds’, so to speak. They have created a comprehensive, open-source standard utilising semantic web technologies within the real estate industry which realtors and property businesses can efficiently rely on in the long term. One of the key benefits to come forward as a result is for buildings to become more sustainable within smart cities and significantly contribute to lower carbon emissions.
After making the public preview release in August 2022, both standards continue to be utilised as standalone projects, each one being managed by their designated consortium. At a glance, the combination of the two standards broadly covers:
These complete and integrated standards have enabled the real estate industry to drive forward digital transformation at a faster rate, not only improving ROI and adoption, but also meeting the various expectations of building owners and tenants as well as society at large. They have already achieved many of the objectives pertaining to lowered CO2 emissions and contributing to a more sustainable smart city.
This data harmonisation of RealEstateCore and Brick Schema has enabled real estate business owners and other stakeholders in the industry to unlock the true value and untapped potential from data on their buildings. In turn, this has led to supporting new applications to reduce energy consumption as well as interact in real-time with energy sources and grids – significantly improving the tenant experience as a result through automated facility management, for example, and more.
As we’ve briefly discussed, to complete the data harmonisation process for real estate, you must not only map your data, but more importantly, you must have a clear understanding of how the various data sources will interact within the data infrastructure.
This can quickly become a cumbersome and complex task, and can get even more so if you don’t have a reasonable amount of experience in data harmonisation for real estate and especially don’t know which tools to use. The Harmony app, for instance, can help you create the appropriate data infrastructure, helping you establish a seamless and robust data pipeline from day one, among other things.
Any real estate company looking to become competitive in this day and age must make data a part of its strategy. When striving for new heights in terms of market analysis and analytics as well as business intelligence and uncovering hidden insights or untapped opportunities, for example – data harmonisation in real estate plays a key role to help achieve the above, yet many companies find it to be a stumbling block, preventing them from reaching the desired business outcomes and, ultimately, projected growth goals.
The process of managing huge volumes of data on a daily basis across diverse systems and stakeholders within the property portfolio can present a number of challenges and complexities, such as:
With commercial real estate, for example, data usually comes through multiple and often diverse sources – from financial records and lease agreements to tenant information and property service/maintenance logs. Each one of these sources may have their own unique structure, format, and data quality standards, making the consolidation and harmonisation process cumbersome.
As the sheer volume of data that a real estate organisation must work with continues to grow at an exponential rate, manual data management methods are simply not practical or cost-effective. In fact, they are prone to a lot of human errors where consistency cannot be maintained. At this stage, the automation, integration, cleansing, and validation of data through a variety of processes become downright essential, in order to maintain its accuracy and consistency throughout.
Real estate businesses often work with a variety of stakeholders – such as vendors, brokers, tenants, owners, investors, etc. – with each having their own data management systems and practices. The coordination of data management efforts and establishing uniform data governance policies across all varieties of stakeholders can quickly become very challenging and time-consuming.
Mid-large real estate organisations, especially those with a diverse commercial portfolio, typically operate through multiple software applications and systems – e.g. software and systems for customer relationship management, accounting, property management, and more. These systems are often not designed to share data seamlessly, which can lead to potential inconsistencies and data silos.
Any data-specific challenges being faced by real estate businesses can be resolved effectively along with a boost in operational efficiency (among other things), simply by incorporating the right data harmonisation tool for real estate:
Comprehensive reporting and analysis– Harmony allows real estate professionals to view comprehensive reports and conduct data-driven analysis in order to study trends and make decisions around key performance indicators such as revenue forecasts, return on investment, lease expirations, occupancy rates, maintenance, and more. This will ultimately allow stakeholders to quickly respond to shifting trends, tap into hidden opportunities, and make more informed decisions.
Better regulatory compliance and risk management– In the real estate sector, legal and regulatory compliance is absolutely critical. Harmony enables real estate businesses to maintain more accurate and up-to-date records, ensuring compliance with safely regulations, legal obligations, lease agreements, governance, and more. Under the right data governance practices, property businesses can more effectively mitigate risks related to contract disputes, financial penalties, and non-compliance.
More streamlined operations and efficiency boost– Any business operating in the real estate and property management sector must deal with several stakeholders at once. Harmony helps to streamline operations by centralising all data pertaining to leases, properties, financials, maintenance records, and more.
When you have a unified perspective on all your critical information in one place, your property managers can expedite processes faster, respond to tenant requests in real time, optimise resource allocation, and improve operational efficiency across the board.
Seamless integration with other systems– Effective property management demands the involvement and integration of various systems as well as software applications (lease management, asset management, facility management, accounting, etc.). Harmony can act as a foundation for your data integration, allowing seamless data exchange between your systems. When disparate systems are all interconnected, it can help to enhance the quality of your data, improve overall interoperability and reduce data redundancies.
Vastly enhanced data integrity and accuracy– In the property and real estate industry, having access to reliable and accurate data in real-time is crucial for effective property valuation, tenant relations, financial analysis, budgeting and forecasting, leasing, etc. It’s a long list and that’s why you should be using a tool for data harmonisation in real estate which helps to produce and consolidate consistent, error-free data – providing all your stakeholders with actionable and reliable insights to support the various decision-making processes.
By implementing governance practices and data validation rules, for example, Harmony can help to reduce the risk of data inconsistencies and inaccuracies, as well as data duplication – something which can prove costly to real estate businesses, often setting them several steps back from the competition.
Data harmonisation in real estate tends to become a stumbling block for most real estate companies looking to leave their mark in the industry by harnessing a new level of market insight and analysis. However, to achieve this, manual data processing is no longer feasible, practical or cost-effective as it can lead to human errors where data discrepancies and inconsistencies inevitably arise.
To get your data to really work for you, you need to have the right data harmonisation tool in your arsenal. The Harmony app is a tool for data harmonisation in real estate unlike any other. It helps you collate all your data and check it for consistency, along with a complete string of features that all collectively help you extract the most value from the data you collect each day.
It will help you map your data in a way that’s straightforward and easy to understand for everyone involved, ultimately, allowing decision makers to see how the multiple data sources interact with the current data infrastructure.
Come up with a smarter data model to meet both your present and future business needs by enabling the right data analytics to harmonise your data in a direct and hassle-free way. Gain additional insight into your sales and marketing efforts, easily identify the pain points of everyone from your staff members and direct customers to investors and stakeholders – and understand how specific aspects of your real estate business are either contributing to the greater goal or detracting from it.
Try Harmony today with a free, limited-time trial.
