Industry leaders from Grubb Properties and MG Properties Group recently shared insights on big data, benchmarking and forecasting with Yardi’s Paul Yount. “You won’t be successful in any market if you don’t have the right tools. You need the data. You have to be ready and prepared,” said Joe Anfuso, chief financial officer at MG Properties Group. Nothing could have been truer for real estate companies in 2020. With unanticipated challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, real estate operators had to act fast to protect their bottom lines and keep staff and residents safe. For most companies, that meant adopting technology to transform their businesses. Read on to learn how Grubb Properties and MG Properties Group have been using Asset IQ, Yardi’s multifamily asset management software part of the Yardi Elevate suite of multifamily solutions, to guide decisions and improve performance with better data. Pivoting to online services With the growing demand for contactless leasing and transactions, many operators have made the pivot to doing business online. And it’s likely that contactless leasing — including self-guided tours — will be around long after the pandemic. Additionally, asset intelligence driven by big data has been guiding real estate operators through challenging times and will continue to lead the way. “2020 budget numbers were very different from what we projected in 2019. We didn’t see the normal seasonal changes, and budgets were pretty much out the window which has made competitor and peer data very important to accurately measure performance. We need to know how we’re measuring up to our competitors, what concessions and lease terms we’re offering and if we’re keeping the back door closed to avoid being in a vulnerable position,” said Shawn Cardner, executive vice president of Grubb Properties. According to Joe Anfuso,...

“Grubb has a top-down philosophy of promoting long-term residents,” said Shawn Cardner, executive vice president of operations at Grubb Properties. “We always felt our long-term resident program that caps rent at five years was the right thing to do and was working, but we didn’t have a lot of data on it. We do now thanks to deep property and portfolio analytics, and that’s very exciting.” The analytics Cardner refers to come from Yardi Asset IQ, part of the Yardi Elevate Suite for multifamily. Asset IQ is taking Grubb beyond business intelligence by providing property, portfolio and market analytics for benchmarking, budgeting, analyzing collections and adjusting quickly to changing needs. Cardner and other execs get fast insights from dashboards that display real-time performance with drilldown to details. They not only have stats that show residents are staying longer but can also “get into the weeds” and see what’s behind the numbers to really understand what’s happening at their properties. Validating a long-term renter program At one of Grubb’s apartment communities, an impressive 42% increase in length of residency was only part of the story. “Using data from Asset IQ, we correlated the success of a long-term resident program to important financial metrics: $30 increase in rental income per unit and $32 lower expenses,” said Cardner. Grubb utilizes the benchmark KPIs on its Asset IQ dashboard for renewal rates, renewal percentages and new lease rates. The company also likes to keep a close eye on maintenance expenditures. Cardner added, “I see benchmark data as a tool that brings visibility into possible areas of improvement.” Benchmarking against peers and budget With Asset IQ, Grubb can compare its actual leasing, financial and operational data to a defined peer set and to its own budget. An easy-to-use dashboard...