As a real estate developer, software purpose-built to meet your needs has been hard to find. As other industries saw added efficiencies with technology innovations and software, real estate development was left with spreadsheets to track project progress and manage hundreds of vendors.
And while developers have gotten savvy with their spreadsheets, the time sink involved in building out up-to-date reports, reconciling data across departments, and entering the data to track costs add up and does little to improve the bottom line of your real estate projects.
So, what can you do when looking to build industry-leading workflows that cut down on low-value admin work and aid high-value strategic decision-making? The latest in real estate development software is a game-changer.
Modernizing Project Delivery
Developers have started shifting their view of technology and the lack of modern software for real estate development teams has recently become universally recognized. Although many developers still believe that there isn’t a solution that’ll be more efficient than spreadsheets, clinging to that notion can prove to be detrimental when other developers are surpassing them by adopting modern technology.
Modern real estate development software incorporates the latest in automation, data analytics, and artificial intelligence to increase workflow efficiency. This is allowing leading teams to bring projects in on time and under budget consistently.
The time sink required to keep your project spreadsheets up to date isn’t the only issue solved with real estate development technology. Spreadsheets aren’t always easy to track down. They’re often stored on an individual’s hard drives or you have to spend time investigating which version has the most up-to-date information. When your team can’t quickly access data to make the most informed project decisions, you’re missing a crucial aspect of building a dependable project delivery process.
Reactive, gut-driven decision-making leads to:
- Depending on error-prone historical spreadsheets or ad-hoc conversations to inform future decision making
- Inability to contextualize vendor performance across past and present projects
- Backward-looking reports that tell you what already happened on your project, and prohibit forward-looking decision making
- Spending 30% of your time focused on tedious, administrative tasks instead of managing potential risks and critical events on your projects.
That’s one of the critical reasons real estate development software is taking off. The ability to provide transparency around project data and progress with easy-to-understand dashboards that reduce inefficient communication between teams, leadership and investors while making quick, data-backed decisions easy.
Real estate development software eliminates many of the pain points development teams have been putting up with for decades.
How Real Estate Development Software Works
How exactly does modern real estate development technology create a single source of truth for your project?
Let’s start with automation. Real estate development software syncs with your current email-based workflows to automate data extraction from incoming project documentation like invoices, proposals, commitments, and other backup documents. The data then flows through the system, populating real-time dashboards to give you and other stakeholders visibility into how your project is progressing.
The data flow doesn’t end there. Your team can then pull key industry-standard reports based on the real-time data being populated with every new project document. With real estate development software, you’re eliminating two significant time commitments from your day-to-day: manual data entry and report compiling.
You are building a single source of truth for all your projects that all stakeholders can access while reducing hours of administrative work. Using real estate development software for all of your projects leads to compounding benefits. Whereas most of your past project data is stored on various spreadsheets, modern solutions allow you to store and use historical data to inform project decisions.
Having data on how similar project decisions panned out can inform what you do on your current project. And when you can reference that past data quickly, it becomes easy to make informed choices instead of trusting your gut.
How Real Estate Development Software Aids Better Project Management and Outcomes
Modern real estate development software uses automation and data analytics to aid your project outcomes, but what about artificial intelligence? AI is used to track cash flow trends and flag budget lines that are trending high. This allows project managers to make real-time adjustments instead of backtracking to see where budget forecasts were off after the fact.
For example, if the system flags that labor costs are trending high, you can swap certain materials, like granite countertops, for similar-looking but cheaper materials to account for the budget line overrun. You’ve now prevented what would have been lost money without changing the project’s overall scope. Multiply this by the numerous budget lines across multiple projects, and the savings add up to a small fortune. It’s a great look for the project team responsible for making these budget-saving decisions.
With real estate development software, your project team is shifting their mindset to proactive, data-driven decision-making. With the backing of real estate development software your team is empowered to:
- Make data-driven assumptions during initial project estimates based on smartly indexed historical cost data.
- Make smarter buyout decisions by evaluating vendors in the context of their peers.
- Leverage early warning systems alerting you to critical cost overruns and budget issues that might affect the successful completion of your project.
- Get ahead of and manage critical risks and challenges on your project.
Overall, you’re eliminating the cost ramifications of unexpected change orders, bottleneck decision making, spreadsheet data entry errors, staff turnover, loss of project confidence among stakeholders, and a bloated staff.
Access the Best Real Estate Development Solution on the Market
Northspyre is the only purpose-built real estate development software created to empower project teams to achieve easier, more predictable outcomes on your multi-million dollar, complex projects.
Don’t risk your project returns. See how real estate development software can start working for you by booking a demo of Northspyre today.
