When dealing with third-party property managers, businesses and individuals often face significant hurdles in accessing essential data. This data, pivotal for property management data analytics, encompasses various operational aspects such as property maintenance, tenant details, financial transactions, and more. The Challenge of Accessing Data from Property Management.
Why It’s Hard to Get Data from Third-Party Property Managers:
- Proprietary Systems and the Property Manager Data Model: Property management companies implement proprietary software or systems tailored to their operations. These systems are unique and have limited integration with other platforms. This makes it difficult to extract data and analyze property management data.
- Data Ownership Disputes: Ambiguities surrounding data ownership can further complicate access. Property owners may believe they have the right to access all property data. However, management contracts may not grant them these rights. This lack of access affects the property manager’s data model.
- Concerns Over Scrutiny: Property managers may be hesitant to share data due to concerns about criticism of their performance or strategies.
- Lack of Industry Standardization: Without a universal data standard, the property manager data model varies significantly across the board. This lack of uniformity hinders the ability to aggregate or compare data efficiently from diverse sources.
- Operational Overhead: Extracting, formatting, and sharing data can be time-consuming. This can discourage property managers from doing it, especially when they are handling many properties. Additionally, it can also affect data analysis for property management.
- Data Integrity and Reliability: Property managers worry about sharing incorrect or old data because they are unsure about how accurate it is.
- Technical Expertise Limitations: Not all firms possess the necessary technical skills or resources to effectively manage data extraction and sharing, complicating the property manager data model implementation.
Tackling the Third-Party Property Manager Data Challenge
Despite all outstanding concerns, this is not an unsolvable issue. It’s challenging, but it’s something we’ve been addressing for years.
- Work with Your Property Manager: Most modern Property Management Systems (PMS) tools, such as Yardi, Entrata, MRI, etc., have the capability to export standard reports. Your property manager should be able to set up an automated export.
- Land the Data in a Secure Spot: Whether the data is being sent directly to your SFTP, database, or via a secure encrypted email (then moved to an SFTP using a logic app), ensure all the data is consolidated in one place.
- Scrub the Data: The reports from each PMS are in wildly different formats, with nested columns, totals, sub headers, making it very difficult to import this data directly. Develop a process using Python or another coding language to transform this data into a clean, structured format. The good news is, once you’ve done it once, you can reuse this process for other property managers.
- Organize the Data: Create a secondary process that picks up the newly cleaned and formatted data and moves it into a data warehouse. This allows you to consolidate all your property manager data in one place. No more different names for columns by different sources. Whether the data comes from Yardi, Entrata, MRI, RealPage, your data scientists don’t need to worry about the source and can focus on deriving the insights you need.
Conclusion
Accessing data from third-party property managers is essential for informed decision-making in property management. By setting clear expectations, improving communication, and utilizing technological solutions, stakeholders can overcome these challenges and harness the power of property management data analytics to achieve their objectives.
Read more about our out-of-the-box real estate data warehouse solution here.