Institutional Real Estate Owners

Own your data

Structured data from existing properties are an important success factor for asset and property management now and in the future. As promising as BIM operational ideas and building sensors are, in the end, the FM contractors who are actually in your properties every day know the condition of your building services systems best. PropOps enables you and your contractors to either document the system and maintenance orders directly in our cloud or – this applies especially to those on the Lünendonk ranking – to seamlessly connect the corresponding CAFM systems to PropOps. In this situation, your contractor’s employees and subcontractors continue to use their company’s own, familiar systems and you, your asset and your property management still benefit from centralised, contractor-inclusive data access.

Institutional real estate owners have faced a dilemma in recent years: On the one hand, there is no interest in granular data from real estate, after all, that’s the reason operator responsibility has been passed on to a contractor. On the other hand, monthly reports compiled manually by the contractor and stored on SharePoint or registering on countless contractor portals are not sustainable solutions. The data made available in this way is captured in documents and cannot be automatically processed further. However, it is precisely this automated further processing that is needed to generate error-free, flexible reports that answer important questions for asset and property management and, at the same time, frees them from the monthly flood of documents. Whether you use PropOps’ own portals and reports, or access PropOps via its microservices or your BI tools – you choose the path that best suits your organisation and your IT strategy.

Did you know?

One of PropOps’ first development partners was the real estate arm of a large southern German bank. The views of an institutional investor with high requirements in terms of operational safety and auditability were incorporated into PropOps at an early stage.

Operational safety

“Of course, you hand over building management to contractors in order to delegate operator responsibility. Nonetheless, the data on systems, including maintenance plans and logs, created during facility management are an important component for central inventory and operational documentation. And having that information for all properties and contractors. Regardless of whether a supplier has been operating a property well for many years or a contractor has just changed.

The data created by your contractor’s processes: updating system directories, subsequent documentation of header data, maintenance orders and their progress, test reports, image files and feedback on upcoming CAPEX measures are the foundations of valuable documentation. PropOps takes over the automation of operational documentation. We are convinced that PropOps can handle the majority of data flooding in, with no need for manual intervention by the property owner.”

Contractor coordination

“Your technical asset manager, your in-house property management or your property management team work hand in hand with your contractors every day. And have been, for the most part, over many years. Both parties deserve to have access to the same information base. The additional delay in compiling monthly reports means you are unnecessarily flying blind and they are a time-consuming, error-prone and unpopular task for contractors, time for which he would rather spend on the quality in the building. The pain of having to log into various contractor portals means they are not a viable alternative to a cloud-based information platform such as PropOps.

Since PropOps was founded, we have not met an asset manager from an institutional investor for whom quality is not the top priority when it comes to facility management. Quality in FM requires partnership-based collaboration, which can also be represented in monetary terms through bonus / malus clauses in service contracts. However, implementing these clauses often becomes a hurdle: How should the performance of a contract partner be assessed if there is no common information base between both partners, or the assessment needed is too detailed to be carried out? PropOps automates the evaluation process on a shared database and thereby raises partnerships to a new level of collaboration.

PropOps creates transparency and allows an information technology deep dive, if necessary – but also enables your team to resurface very quickly. This prevents you from getting lost in day-to-day business details that your contractor should take care of. Situations can be handled confidently in the interests of the investor; such as an anchor tenant of a core property who has manged to get through to the owner asking for help, or the failure of a system component in a value-add investment, for which a quick, informed decision on replacement or repair is required based on its log.”

Decision on CAPEX measures

The value share of building systems in a property is increasing steadily. For CAPEX measures, both an overview and – for the specific individual case – a detailed basis for decision-making are required. PropOps enables you to run reports across both contractors and portfolios and, if necessary, limit the report to a specific system type or maintenance period. This is how you reach the right altitude for fundamental decisions and investment strategies. If, in turn, details are required for an individual decision, PropOps allows you to zoom in on an property, a system type within the property, a specific system or even a component thereof. Header data, accumulated maintenance logs with corresponding supporting documentation, and image and text comments from previous contractors allow you to quickly gauge and initiate the necessary measures.

Audits and compliance reviews

With a changing sector, the need for information is increasing inexorably. You already do ESG certification. Evaluations, evidence and processes relevant for asset or property management can only be extracted if the granularity of the data allows it. PropOps takes the building and process data in the highest degree of detail from contractors’ CAFM systems – in order to then split and reassemble them again and again for the most varied of applications. Each piece of data has a unique ID, various time stamps and an origin so that, in case of doubt, the record can be fully explained. The cloud infrastructure on which PropOps is based even allows data to be archived in an audit-secure manner upon request in the setup phase. Whatever questions there are in the future, PropOps already has the building blocks for the answers in its cloud and therefore accessible for you.

Due diligence

Ideally, properties under sale are fully documented when being checked by interested parties. Commercial information such as rental contracts is the much smaller part that has to be dealt with. All too often, the condition of building systems and their operating logs are the far greater unknowns. If you deliver quickly, cleanly and completely without the contractors having to scrape together the existing data in the background, you ensure less uncertainty and fewer risks in purchase price negotiations. You actively contribute to a successful sale. With PropOps, it’s just as easy to give a potential buyer digital access to the property in the cloud or export the data in a well-prepared form. After the transfer of ownership, the buyer even has the option of continuing to operate the digital operational image of the property in PropOps.