Data Analytics Helps You to Attract and Retain End-Users

For too long, real estate asset owners and portfolio managers haven’t paid enough attention to the needs and wants of end-users – those who live and work within any given property. If your end-users are unhappy with their homes, offices or shops, they will move someplace more to their liking, thus becoming someone else’s end-users. This is not good, because vacancies represent disruption, ROI-harming disruption.

The way to preempt this type of disruption is to identify, design, build, and operate assets that people want to occupy. But therein lies the rub. In order to offer the public desirable assets, one must first understand people’s needs and wants. Such an understanding is readily achievable by utilizing what we refer to as data analytics. We believe data analytics, including descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics, makes it possible to do more than simply understand what end-users need or want – it is possible to place those requirements at the very heart of each and every phase of an asset’s lifecycle.

Data Transforms Experiences

Real estate asset owners and portfolio managers typically have access to data (such as financial performance, energy consumption or operations & maintenance data) — but they often don’t have enough to be helpful or they lack the means of making sense of it all. Either way, used effectively, analyzing data gives us the information we need to transform the experience of acquiring, constructing, and operating new and existing assets.

Consider, for example, BIM (building information modeling). Perhaps you are already employing this planning-and-execution tool (good for you, if you are). By combining BIM with augmented-reality or virtual-reality technology, you can leverage historical data of a property to improve future designs. One way would be by knowing where to position sensors so you can optimally track how end-users utilize the asset. The data captured by those sensors would then be analyzed to inform the design of future assets or to guide continuous improvements or optimize operation and maintenance of existing ones. In either event, end-user satisfaction is promoted and vacancies reduced.

On a larger scale, data can reveal how end-users feel about an individual asset, or a neighborhood or even an entire city. Increasingly, data about people’s travel and activity patterns in and around urban zones are being mined and collected for clues as to which types of assets a city needs, and where those particular assets should be located to best serve the public interest.

In short, data analytics benefits everyone. For you, the benefit is much smarter decision-making, less disruption, and a potentially superior ROI. For end-users, the benefit is improved quality of life. For cities, the benefit is prosperity (which opens the door to letting you and your end-users enjoy even more benefits).

Arcadis works with a number of partners and providers to help our clients acquire and make use of data. This data, along with the use of BIM, computational design and generative design skills yield exceptional insights that help them to make smarter decisions. A good example is our “City Analytics” capabilities which have helped metropolitan areas easily figure out where to put housing and what types of dwellings those should be.

Applied smartly, data gives us the means of becoming more focused on the end-user than ever before to improve quality of life for everyone.

Jason Grandin Susanne Knorr