Cloud Clarity

CRE Data Trends

By Joel Nelson on Jun 5, 2017 in News

A group of real estate technology experts—including Alex Stanton, Yardi industry principal for commercial—took stock of cloud computing’s growing role in real estate in a recent Realcomm-sponsored webinar, “The Latest Trends in the CRE Cloud.”

With about 80% of companies running some portion of their workloads in public or private clouds, the panel explored the new opportunities this dynamic environment presents real estate companies as well as potential pitfalls.

Emphasis on security

Stanton focused on the challenge of safeguarding the massive amount of information involved in cloud-based commercial asset management. “Sources of real estate data are ever-expanding, and more public and private information is available as the Internet of Things takes hold,” he said.  Commercial real estate is now edging into the “Big Data” phase with transactional data being married with content including photos/videos, satellite imagery, weather data and building performance systems.

While the collection points for this information can optimize business and site efficiency, they also present more potential points of entry for security threats. As a result, he said, “the bar is continuously being set higher for security.”  Yardi and other solution providers create vulnerability management protocols and multiple levels of data center and application security.  Real estate companies, meanwhile, must educate their employees on protecting the information they access with business applications on remote devices and other means.

“We continue to see the acceleration of technology adoption in the commercial real estate space. It will be an exciting journey, but from a data governance standpoint we need to constantly adapt and identify the solutions that will connect them in an ever-evolving environment,” Stanton said.

IT’s new perspective

Another panelist was Bob Rybak, chief information officer for Morguard, whose portfolio includes 44 million square feet of commercial space and adopted 100% cloud hosting within two years.  Rybak illustrated how the cloud is changing IT’s role.  “Within IT, the focus has shifted from an operations mentality to delivering strategic value throughout the organization.  The cloud brought us much closer to the business and gave us a seat at the table for strategic planning,” he said.

Challenges a company faces when adopting the cloud, Rybak said, include accepting complete dependence on an outside network’s reliability and resilience, and managing an environment in which an estimated 40% of the workforce will be freelance, 50% will work remotely, and 80% of most workers’ time will be spent away from any office location by 2020.

Starting from scratch

Mark Brown, vice president and head of technology for Starwood Retail Partners, whose $6 billion of assets includes 30 malls and lifestyle centers, offered the perspective of building a cloud system with no legacy personnel, technology, culture or processes.  Making a wholly organic start at a time when cloud technology was becoming mature allowed Starwood to “piece together the most flexible, mobile, available, cost-efficient business processes and the technology to support them,” Brown said.

Adopting an integrated cloud platform strengthened Starwood’s control over business processes.  “We can measure a process from start to finish,” Brown said—for example, the amount of time it takes an approved lease to be signed.  “We measure the entire process as a continuous component, which it is because there aren’t breaks between the steps.”  Looking to future opportunities, Starwood continues to build its business intelligence tools and seek ways to move its few remaining self-hosted applications for accounting and other operations to the cloud.

Untapped power

Ted Kempf, service industries director for Microsoft, sees the cloud as an incubator for redefining business models and creating personalized computing environments.  The cloud, he said, unifies disparate applications into new business processes while processing massive amounts of data.

“Microsoft believes digital transformation will be the focus for many organizations, including those in real estate, for years to come. There’s so much opportunity to unlock value with the cloud’s advantages,” he said, pointing to emerging services such as predictive analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence.  Companies born in the cloud, such as Uber, Netflix, Zillow and Airbnb, reaped the cloud’s “disruptive power,” he said.

Digital transformation “isn’t possible without the power of the cloud,” Kempf said.  “At the end of the day, it’s all about processing a massive amount of data to make better decisions.”

Learn about the role of Yardi cloud services in property management.