The future of the development industry will be driven by technology, with automation, data analytics, and artificial intelligence boosting efficiency and streamlining processes. AI adoption alone is expected to see an annual growth rate of 37.3% from 2023 to 2030 across industries, and real estate will be no exception. Big data and analytics have also redefined the development process, providing invaluable access to historical project data to empower informed decision-making. Automation is also changing how project teams work, eliminating tedious and time-consuming tasks across organizations. Every step of the development process, from planning to stabilization, can be facilitated by modern real estate development software.
Even with all the innovations in the property technology sphere over the past decade, many firms have been slow to adapt and continue to rely on outdated and inefficient practices. From making decisions based solely on a gut instinct to relying on outdated and error-proof spreadsheets, some organizations are unwilling to leave behind workflows that don’t serve them. Meanwhile, leaders in the industry are moving beyond the old ways, embracing technology to supercharge development.
Here are the traits that mean a development team is stuck in the past and may not be the right fit for modern real estate development software and its advanced functionality:
Spreadsheet Enthusiasts
Spreadsheets have been the go-to method for development teams organizing project documents and data in the development industry for decades. Even though organizing projects in spreadsheets has been the industry standard for a long time, the method comes with many frustrations and downsides. By organizing complex project data in spreadsheets, you risk computational errors that can derail your project’s budget, delaying your timeline and resulting in higher costs. Keeping your project organized in a spreadsheet also requires a significant amount of manual data entry, a tedious and time-consuming process that can burden your project team. In addition, spreadsheets prevent your firm from building institutional knowledge, as team members who leave the firm will take their workflows and insights with them.
Despite the many pitfalls spreadsheets present, old-fashioned development firms are hesitant to switch up workflows. If your team enjoys spending countless hours reconciling data and other important project information in outdated and error-prone spreadsheets, modern real estate development software may not be right for you. But if your team wants to standardize and streamline data and document entry, there are solutions on the market. Automation tools make it easy to manage administrative tasks like data uploads and document management across your whole portfolio. By indexing all contracts, proposals, change orders, and lien waivers, you can organize your search data into detailed dashboards. Doing so will increase visibility, transparency, and efficiency across your development team, putting valuable data into key stakeholders’ hands.
Gut-Instinct Decision Makers
Good instincts are a valuable asset to have as a developer, but relying on your gut can be risky business. Developers no longer need to base decisions on instinct alone - conducting proper due diligence and looking at historical project data before acquisition can set a project up for success. For example, if your team isn’t sure a project pencils, data and analytics can help you forecast budgets, and give you a clearer picture of how much contingency to account for.
Northspyre, a purpose-built, single software solution, can help you leverage data to forecast budgets and prevent any surprises in the development process. The platform’s Anticipated Cost Report acts as a key risk detection tool and accurately tracks every aspect of your project finances including contingency, variance, available funds, cost per square foot, acquisition costs and more. Northspyre’s new product, Portfolio Analytics Plus, also lets you predict, plan, and deliver your portfolio strategies and budgets with data-driven insights. You can improve your planning and boost forecasting accuracy with complete visibility of source utilization and cash flow projections across your portfolio.
Understanding what is driving higher and lower costs and how project managers are performing can help you adjust budgets and adapt strategies on current and future projects. Improve planning and forecasting. If your team is uninterested in making effective, data-backed decisions over fallible, gut-instinct decisions, the technology may not be for you. For the forward-thinking development team who want to pair a keen business instinct with data-backed decision-making, Northspyre can help you get started.
Developers Who Think the Job Stops at Acquisition
Land and site selection is an important part of the development process, but ensuring a project’s success does not end at acquisition. Once the financial model is built and a site is acquired, your project team still has a lot of work and oversight to do to ensure assets are delivered on time and on budget. Being hands-off about key aspects of the project lifecycle, such as vendor management, can pose unnecessary issues for your budget.
If you’re happy to let go of the steering wheel once acquisition is over, even as interruptions in a project timeline occur, this approach may not be for you. However, if your team wants to ensure a project comes in on time and on budget, Northspyre offers enhanced vendor tools. The platform can offer your team critical data and contextual information to manage vendor performance through the Vendor Directory. When you click into a particular vendor in the platform, you’ll be able to get insight into how each is impacting the budget line they are associated with, write notes about the relationship, and track files shared between you and the vendor.
Development Teams Over-Dependent on Accounting
Development teams are doing themselves a disservice by siloing off accounting teams, leaving the majority of stakeholders in the dark about a project's finances. If your team is comfortable leaving budget management up to accounting, even when that overburdens finance team members and renders important project data invisible to project team stakeholders, you might not be the right candidate for a modern development platform. However, if you’re looking to unburden accounting from tedious administrative tasks and increase transparency across your organization, technology can facilitate this process.
Northspyre’s accounting integrations work with and not against your development team’s accounting department. The platform is designed specifically for real estate project teams but also helps alleviate many tangential, corresponding activities taken on by accounting teams. Financial teams, including accountants, CFOs, and controllers have enough on their plate without attending to tedious, out-of-scope tasks like data entry, scanning requisitions, or looking up basic information packages. Northspyre automates these tasks, allowing your accounting teams to focus on high-level, strategic guidance. In addition you’ll be able to share key insights with accounting, instead of waiting on teams to seek out important data on their own.
You will also be able to get real-time visibility of a project's financials at every stage of the process, instead of waiting for accounting’s monthly financials to close. Eliminating the need for accounting to pull late nights and making a mad dash to get end-of-month reporting together will also help boost productivity and morale across teams. When it comes to budgeting and reporting, there are no downsides to moving away from ad-hoc and outdated workflows.
The platform integrates seamlessly with top accounting platforms such as Yardi Voyager, MRI, and Sage Intacct. As a result, your team will be able to eliminate low-value tasks like data entry by extracting data from incoming invoices, contracts, and proposals instantly and importing them into existing accounting systems. You’ll also be able to centralize all project data and financials in one cloud-based, easily accessible platform that smartly indexes all critical backup documents. This creates more visibility for everyone on your development team, ensuring key budgetary information isn’t concealed from relevant stakeholders.
Learn More about Northspyre
If your firm is looking to get a competitive edge in the industry by leveraging automation to reduce manual data entry, increase productivity, and maximize returns, modern real estate development software can play a key role. Northspyre is a single-software solution built by and for developers to manage projects proactively, from planning to stabilization. Developers can use the tool to assemble accurate budgets with benchmarked data, organize bids, costs, budgets, projections, and partners, and manage forecasts, contingencies, draws, schedules, and vendors with proactive alerts to save you from costly errors. If you want your firm to be set up well for the future of development, Northspyre may be for you.
Book a demo and learn more about how you can modernize your development process and gain a competitive edge with Northspyre.
