Wouldn’t it be nice to know a vendor is reliable before you agree to do business with them? This knowledge is invaluable to your real estate development team.
If your team has made a habit of storing historical project data in a centralized database then you’re in a much better position to predict a vendor’s performance before they begin work. The problem is that past project data often isn’t easily accessible by your entire team, with only a handful of people having access. When this is the case, your team likely isn’t utilizing important information during vendor decisions.
Let’s take a look into how centralizing all of your vendor data–including proposals, contracts, change orders, and invoices–in real estate development software, enables your team to leverage any data point to make fast, pivotal decisions.
Understanding Institutional Knowledge
Historical data serves as your organization’s unique “institutional knowledge.” Real estate development teams who can quickly access all of their projects’ historical data in one single source of truth have a substantial advantage over competitors that still make decisions based on memory or instinct.
By operationalizing your firm’s institutional knowledge within real estate development software, you’re empowering your team to make every decision based on hard data, enabling smarter decision-making and lessening variance in project outcomes.
4 Ways in Which Your Team Benefits from Vendor Data Transparency
Commercial real estate projects are often complex, costing millions and requiring the services of hundreds of vendors. Your project in development may need everything from a site surveyor to a lighting designer. With so many moving parts, it’s no surprise that the overall success of a project relies greatly on each vendor completing their respective job under the agreed-upon terms of their contract.
Whether or not your vendor does what you need them to shouldn’t be left up to chance. Here’s how real estate development software can be used to ensure expected outcomes.
#1 Using Past Performance to Select the Best Vendors
Data stored from past project projects should be informing current decisions. With past vendor performance data at hand, your team is able to mitigate risk by knowing which potential partners are proven to be reliable and low-risk.
If a vendor has historically had the lowest bids but a higher than average change order count, you’ll know that you’re actually paying more for a cheap initial price. Choosing a vendor that may have a higher initial price but completes their work within your initial budget will only lend itself to getting the budget right from the beginning, and cause fewer problems as the project progresses.
#2 Paying Invoices on Time
In order for your vendor to stay on schedule, they need to be paid on time. With hundreds of vendors on different payment schedules, it’s easy to lose track of who needs to be paid what and when. If your team’s payments are delayed and vendors deprioritize your job, you could easily lose up to three days of progress each month. This can add up to months of lost time over the course of a multi-year project.
Real estate development software keeps your vendor communication organized, allowing you to keep all communications organized within the platform, so you’re always aware of vendor progress and needs.
#3 Clearly Communicating Any Changes
Vendors can only complete their job if they have all the necessary information from your team. This means clearly communicating any changes in design, materials, or expectations should be a priority.
Utilizing a purpose-built, cloud-based platform for early project planning gives all team members and vendors access to the same information. No one person is working off of outdated spreadsheets stored on hard drives, but rather everything is updated in real-time in the cloud. A vendor accidentally completing work that is no longer necessary or working from old directions will result in losing time and money.
#4 Anticipating and Accounting for Any Obstacles
In order to keep your development project running smoothly, you want to be proactive, not reactive. Real estate development software makes it possible to look ahead and identify important trends and challenges arising on our project, as well as see upcoming milestones that could impact a vendor’s job. This includes rising hard and soft costs that must be accounted for. Instead of suffering through delays to your schedule, you can readjust your strategy and keep ahead of any negative fallout or cost escalations.
Explore Northspyre Plan+
Preserving institutional vendor knowledge is a fantastic way to deliver your current and future projects with more efficiency and accuracy. The right real estate development software turns vendor data into your secret weapon.
With Northspyre Plan+, you’ll be able to store all vendor contracts, invoices, COIs (certificates of insurance), and change orders– both historical and current– in an easily accessible, centralized platform. Northspyre Plan+ makes it simple to quickly glean insights from that data to make sure all invoices are paid on time. As well, it ensures that you’re accounting for any change orders, new design direction, or other outside factors that could derail your project.
Northspyre Plan+ puts critical insights and centralized data into your hands, allowing your commercial real estate development team to easily forecast budgets, mitigate risk, and ensure relationships with vendors start on the right footing.
Today’s leading development teams are leveraging vendor data to better manage pre-development and development expenses, obstacles, changes, and schedules. This is done with modern cloud-based applications that reduce administrative burden, increase visibility, and standardize the process for how their team manages projects.
Are you ready to be an industry-leading team?
