Future Trends in Commercial Property Asset Management — Remit Consulting

Future Trends in Commercial Property Asset Management

The property asset management software landscape has evolved significantly in recent years, offering a plethora of options for professionals seeking alternatives to the long-standing industry standard, ARGUS Enterprise. As asset managers, many of you have relied on ARGUS for years, but as new technology is launched all around us, there is a growing interest in exploring new solutions.

We’ve been tracking about 20 new solutions which have come to the market in the last three years, and we’ve had the chance to review many of them with clients. Most have been brought to the market by people who have been frustrated by various aspects of asset management systems historically, and to be fair, there has been very little innovation in this part of the systems market.

System styles

The starting point for many of the systems varies according to the background of the company founders.

Finance

A key focus for a number of systems is aggregating all the data from multiple portfolios and regions into one reporting system. Of paramount importance are the finance numbers and how they are displayed to investors. The complexity and flexibility of each system varies and many of these solutions, when being trialled, are being developed one global fund manager at a time. This slows the overall roll-out but is intended to more fully develop the software before dealing with multiple customers.

Business planning

In the same way, some systems are hoping to integrate the reporting and analysis from many different types of system in place in organisations. Pulling together the data from the property management, valuation, finance and building systems gives a complete view of the properties and portfolios – dashboards then show different views for different users.

AI

Most systems nowadays claim to use AI to make the user’s job simpler. This is starting to be applied to limit the amount of work required to set up the systems. We’ve heard that several systems are experimenting with live searches of lease documents – i.e. reading every pdf lease anew for each query. This will overcome the need for individual lease documents to be extracted into a separate database and kept up to date with each new adjustment.

Information hub

Recent developments from existing market solutions have leant toward gathering a far wider selection of data to give a fuller picture of the investments. Data feeds from news sources and indices like MSCI or even Remit’s own ReMark can be included in the data reported through these hubs.

Valuation

In many cases, valuations are still left to existing software, particularly as few solutions have troubled the incumbents in this market. There are new solutions, and existing which are seeing a resurgence; however, with the move towards increased integration of disparate systems, this area is often left alone in specification discussions.

Conclusion

Let’s not forget that many large property organisations are building their own solutions from an increasingly accessible toolbox – Microsoft for example provides all the software applications and tools you need to create a bespoke solution if you have the right IT department. Additionally, AI provides a quick and easy way to build code if that is your background.

The abundance of software options in the property asset management space reflects a market responding to the evolving needs of professionals. Whilst ARGUS Enterprise continues to be a significant and important player, new technology has opened the door for other innovative asset management solutions. As an asset manager, it's crucial to evaluate these options based on your specific requirements, considering factors such as functionality, scalability, integration capabilities, and cost-effectiveness. Remit’s advice is to gain consensus amongst the whole team before you look at systems. Yes, we know that’s difficult, but it will significantly reduce the pain later on during implementation.

The future of property asset management software lies in platforms that can provide comprehensive, data-driven insights while maintaining flexibility and ease of use. As competition in this space intensifies, we can expect to see continued innovation and improvement across all available solutions.

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