It’s no secret that commercial real estate projects require razor-sharp planning and flawless execution to make the whole process worthwhile.
So why have real estate developers clung to a project management approach that hasn’t been optimized since the early 2000s?
It’s easy to reason that there’s no time to change, the disruption would be costly, or your employees are used to doing things a certain way, but in the end, these are simply excuses that are costing your organization the very thing it sets out to make: money.
Creating a streamlined, repeatable approach to project management will ensure your projects meet the desired outcome, time and time again.
Here’s how to uncomplicate real estate project management.
Sunset Legacy Real Estate Processes
Excel is helpful software but typically not the best information database for your organization. If you depend on error-prone historical spreadsheets to inform future
decision-making, you’re opening these crucial decisions to human error. And when those input errors happen, they are challenging to catch—leading to an outcome riddled with mistakes and skyrocketing budgets that no stakeholder has planned for.
When you review what went wrong, can you pinpoint the data entry mistake or the equation producing numbers that are just slightly off? It’s unlikely that the same errors will persist in future projects. Your organization must be able to contextualize vendor performance across past and present projects. There’s stagnation without a system for consistently growing and improving from each project.
And when you focus on tedious, administrative duties instead of managing potential risks and critical events on your projects, your organization isn’t maximizing the value of your time and expertise.
The key is to create a repeatable project management system that isn’t reliant on any single person. Reducing manual data entry or bottlenecks in the project management process and creating a system that houses all the necessary information of the project in one, easily understandable approach, leads to far more manageable projects. Your stakeholders will take notice of the clear improvements in each phase of development.
What Does a Quality Real Estate Project Management System Look Like?
If you’re setting out to implement a better commercial real estate project management process, you need to be sure you’re making data-driven assumptions during the project planning phases. This includes making effective estimations based on well-indexed historical cost data. Whether that’s through your internal database or more robust project management software, this is critical to reducing complications later.
Build and continuously optimize your process for evaluating vendors to make smarter decisions. Choosing the wrong vendors upfront is costly for any project, so the decision must incorporate time and data here. What’s your history with their work? Relying on your well-organized, easy-to-digest historical data can prevent repeated mistakes.
Keep a close eye on your budget and cost overruns by setting up alerts that might affect the successful completion of your project. Warning notifications help you get ahead of and manage critical risks and challenges that often spring up. With the suitable systems in place, you can catch the issues that lead to project complications and ballooning project budgets.
But what’s the best way to set up efficient systems?
How Real Estate Development Software Streamlines Your Projects
If the project management issues above sound familiar, you aren’t alone. The industry is playing catch up on how to best use technology to optimize commercial real estate projects. Luckily, software can transform your organization into a well-organized, repeatable machine that completes commercial real estate projects with minimal disruption.
Real estate development software helps improve project efficiencies by reducing labor-intensive manual data entry, allowing project managers to focus their time on what drives revenue to the organization.
This type of software also increases the credibility of your information by eliminating errors caused by relying on spreadsheets for complex formulas and accurate data. Again, spreadsheets are prone to manual data entry errors. With all the project data and costs associated with one system, errors become a relic of the past. And lead to the desired outcomes of the stakeholders.
With accurate data stored on an easy-to-access platform, you’re empowering your team to track metrics across your entire portfolio of projects and make informed decisions. With real-time data, you’re also able to quickly share digestible project updates with your financial partners, executive team, or clients while eliminating knowledge gaps across stakeholders and project friction.
Can your organization afford not to be using a real estate development software solution with benefits this clear?
Are you looking for more commercial real estate project management guidance? Subscribe to the Northspyre blog for more articles like this sent straight to your inbox.
