Benefits of an integrated service delivery model

Most people recognise the benefit of good property management in protecting and even increasing the value of their assets. But the more real estate you collect, the more difficult it becomes to manage effectively, especially since property management as a stand-alone service is no longer enough.

The world is speeding up, and taking too long to make the right decision – or even making the right decision at the wrong time – could weigh heavily on a property portfolio’s return on investment. For example, if a fund manager is still chasing the paper trail that comes with traditional property management, evaluating individual assets can take longer. That means those bad apples are racking up unnecessary costs for a prolonged period. It also means that by the time an opportunity is discovered, it may already be too late to make the most of it.

A more comprehensive solution that doesn’t just manage the individual assets in the portfolio is required. It should instead give the fund manager full, transparent and remotely accessible visibility of real-time detain one place, to react to the dynamic global business environment and tie the real estate directly into the business strategy more effectively. This is where an integrated service delivery model can be of benefit.

Do more at once

An integrated service delivery model enhances operational efficiency by presenting a clear and unified picture of your business strategy, existing assets, and real estate market data. This facilitates closely coordinated activity across multiple services and properties, using a real estate decision-making cycle of just five steps – strategise, locate, build, manage, review.

Where traditionally these steps had to be carried out consecutively, and separately for each individual property, integration combines all the services and properties together in a more holistic manner.

Guide business decisions with data

An integrated service delivery model consolidates regular real estate management services like lease administration and facilities management, with value-added services such as energy and sustainability services, corporate finance and capital markets, project management, as well as strategic consulting. Tying all these services together for effective business decision-making requires accurate portfolio data to be captured and processed. There are several lease administration technology tools to assist with this, highlighting what we call “key events”.

Key events include break options, renewals and lease expirations. They give the business an opportunity to trigger portfolio-wide decisions and identify the source of ongoing real estate issues to refine their asset positions. Is one of the portfolio assets too large? Does a team need to grow and take up more space in their building? Is a business in the right location? All these questions can be addressed with key events monitoring.

Align portfolio strategy and business goals

To link a portfolio strategy to business goals, customised portfolio tools enable the monitoring and management of all locations in a portfolio – whether 10 or 10,000, from one easy to use web-based dashboard tool. From here, the user can access a series of customisable dashboards to view printable reports, key portfolio data, analytics and predictive modelling – all at their fingertips!

This helps drive greater accountability, increases control and consistency in reporting, and highlights new opportunities to fulfil business objectives. One way of doing this is by looking at real estate data, business data and marketing data together, to identify where they overlap to drive these objectives, such as cost saving or portfolio right-sizing. Various companies are now producing customized tools that provide this integrated view, like JLL’s Portfolio Analytics Tool (PAT).

It’s clear that with an integrated service delivery model, your portfolio issues won’t multiply as your properties do. Instead, they will fuel progress in the portfolio, by offering greater visibility to identify lucrative business opportunities. It also allows more control, to manage the divide between cost reduction and improved employee productivity – all while simultaneously eradicating the need to juggle service providers for various functions. Take a tech smart approach to your real estate portfolio and see more results and benefits with integration.

 

By Chinwe Ajene-Sagna