Almost two years ago, Alliance Residential, one of the country’s largest private multifamily owners, managers, and developers, hired an outside firm to examine its data practices and determine how to build a multifamily-specific analytics interface that would save time and money and offer information in real time. The decision was made to invest in two off-the-shelf software products that Alliance would repurpose for its needs by combining a tremendous amount of data from numerous sources about the company’s 400 communities and 85,000 units. The technical platform, whose working name at press time was Alliance Insights, permits data analysis at both the property and unit levels.
Whether it’s obtaining information about forecasts, sales, amenities, and concessions, or seeing how marketing campaigns and sales strategies affect companywide operations, or acquiring the latest apartment leasing numbers and monthly rents, it’s all available via charts, graphs, and raw data with Alliance Insights. And it’s accessible 24/7 to Alliance’s executive team and management, who can log in and get the details quickly, anytime, without performing countless calculations manually from different systems, and merging source information or filling in spreadsheets, as they used to do, says Scott Pechersky, vice president of technology.
“The time saved has allowed us to explore a whole new level of analytics. A simple question regarding income or expenses across our portfolio that previously took about 200 hours to manually complete is now fully automated and can easily be cross referenced with market data or property attributes from our other systems,” Pechersky says.
Residents, too, benefit, by having more-informed managers.
On the horizon is the company’s plan to develop senior living housing, in part by relying on the new tech platform. “We’re culling data to know what’s needed for this environment in terms of amenities and locations that might be best suited for this product type,” Pechersky says.
