How to Build Data-Driven Forecasts for Your CRE Development
Are you a commercial real estate owner or developer? Do you ever find yourself bogged down in spreadsheets trying, unsuccessfully, to build credible, data-driven forecasts that anticipate where your project is headed? Are you constantly looking backward at historical costs instead? Do you wish you could confidently predict and account for future challenges and opportunities to ensure projects come in on-time and on-budget? You’re not alone.
As a CRE development team, one of your main responsibilities is to track and share key project information via a monthly cost report or requisition package. Your joint venture partners, lenders, clients, senior management teams and other key stakeholders depend on this critical information to understand the health of a project, yet it confines project teams to a 30-day, backward-looking perspective.
It also limits your ability to deliver on an equally as important responsibility: managing the forward-looking strategic direction of your project. With so much time each month dedicated to the previous 30 days – up to 2 weeks! – it’s nearly impossible to switch gears and provide a realistic view into the upcoming 30, 90 or 365 days.
Even for the most cutting-edge and ambitious project teams, the ability to conduct realistic real estate forecasting is reliant on a substantial amount of accurate, organized and accessible data – and your siloed, error-prone spreadsheet system just isn’t cutting it.
So, what’s a super smart, highly motivated project team to do?
Enter Northspyre’s Anticipated Cost Report. It’s a primary, day-to-day management tool that ties together all key financial metrics across the lifetime of a project, analyzing what has, is and could happen on a project by pulling together actual historical costs as well as potential future costs. Think of it as your project roadmap or crystal ball. It is an early warning system that shows you where your project is headed by leveraging your own data to accurately predict future outcomes, risks or opportunities for a given project or portfolio.
In short, the Anticipated Cost Report offers project teams:
- Increased visibility into project finances so you can pivot faster, addressing potential challenges and opportunities before it’s too late. Think: catch a budget line that’s trending over before it negatively impacts your overall budget.
- Smartly indexed data for smarter, faster decision-making on projects and across your portfolio. Think: data at your fingertips when reviewing invoices, negotiating with vendors or weighing strategic direction.
- Confidence and expertise so you never feel like you’re on your back foot. Think: face any potential challenges head-on and show your financial partners, clients and senior management team that you’re always thinking three steps ahead.
- A path to more predictable project outcomes. Think: reduce guesswork by leveraging data when charting a project’s strategic direction, budget and deadlines.
Who wouldn’t want to see into the future and make smarter, informed decisions on multi-million or billion dollar real estate projects? Stop looking backward and get yourself a crystal ball today! Empower your team with credible, data-driven forecasts. Upgrade with Northspyre.