How much asset transparency do multifamily real estate investors require?
It depends, of course. It’s fair to say many investors are fine with the information presented through the investor portal.
Other investors have more granular, focused needs, a data request that’s difficult to predict. What performance KPIs are required? How much data is too much or too little? How timely or historical should it be? How should the data be presented? PDFs? Dashboards? Curated or self-serve?
These questions and others make the work of investment technology chiefs like Joshua Glastein … well, more interesting. Glastein is the chief technology officer for Boston-based Berkshire Residential Investments, a multifamily owner and operator with over 57 years of experience in U.S. residential real estate. As of June 30, 2024, Berkshire has approximately $28.6* billion of real estate assets under management on behalf of a wide range of global institutional investors. Berkshire owns, manages, and oversees approximately 490,000 residential units through equity and debt investments.
Glastein recently shared his views on multifamily asset transparency and reporting.
How do you approach packaged, curated data versus self-serve access?
We wrestle with the question of how much of our data should be curated or self-service. Internal customers want things delivered in a certain way. For investors, we take a white-glove approach and respond to their needs in a highly personalized way.
I believe there’s value to a curated approach for investors. They should be welcome to tell us what data they want and how they want it. We’re in the relationship business. It’s a hands-on approach I believe investors appreciate and expect.
How much we want to curate or self-serve data is still a question. Sometimes investors may want the data packaged in a way that’s best for them. How much is systemic-enabled or not has yet to be determined.
It’s an evolutionary process to understand what investors want, what data is important to them. That process will continue to iterate and evolve over time.
What steps are you taking to simplify investors’ quarterly requests?
We’re working hard to aggregate our data in a more data warehouse-type solution. Ultimately, we want to develop our own reporting and dashboards, which we are developing. Anything that makes it easier to respond to quarterly requests is a huge deal. We’re not a big retail company with thousands of customers. A hands-on approach with how we interact with investors makes a lot of sense.
How close are you to achieving that?
It’s a big initiative. We’re accelerating the process of full deployment on Yardi Performance Manager. Our debt portfolio is fully deployed there, and we’re well along with equity portfolio deployment. We expect to be finished with that this year.
Full deployment will save us a lot of processing time and alleviate the work we do for the accounting and investor reporting teams. It’s a huge deal for us, and there’s a lot of excitement about it.
* Assets under Management ("AUM") reported in this presentation is calculated as the sum of the gross asset value of the Firm's investment vehicles & unfunded capital commitments for such vehicles.
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