Startups are creating software, mobile apps and services to simplify the end-to-end leasing management, data capture and data sharing in the commercial real estate industry. This is enabling real estate management firms, owners and brokers to make better real-time decisions based on business intelligence and analytics resulting from quantified and qualified data.

The key challenge facing the real estate sector is to change the archaic system of managing information primarily with spreadsheets, PDFs and paper documents. Being a very data-centric industry, real estate has its fair share of challenges such as real-time updates on properties already rented, current listings and upcoming vacant listings. Many real estate brokers are still stuck with traditional ways of keeping track of prospects and properties, which results in a lot of their time going into managing data instead of focusing on actual deal flow. There is also a gap in data availability and interpretation of information in a standardized manner between different parties. This makes it tougher for brokers and property managers to decipher and understand the information they have at hand.

Startups are working on solutions to help the industry overcome inconsistencies that result from poorly maintained data. Along with software, it is imperative to engage a team of skilled and trained data analysts to constantly research, clean and enrich data. The data management team needs to use a standard set of terminology to simplify and feed clean, transformed and mapped data into the software enabling end users to search and report on good data. Higher quality and more complete data results in better reporting, analysis and decision-making.

Accurate data available in a common database helps brokers, owners, clients, and other key players to better collaborate not only with colleagues, but with various other stakeholders as well. Information that is streamlined, structured and interlinked is easily accessible by various departments, therefore, reducing chances of wrong interpretation and bad decisions.

We believe that technology and better data management processes can result in sales teams closing more deals and gaining a competitive advantage.