(This blog recaps a portion of the podcast interview Matt Knight of the Property Tech Angels Group conducted with Donald Davidoff, CEO and co-founder of Real Estate Business Analytics.)

The effective integration of disparate data sources stands as a cornerstone for informed decision-making and strategic planning across industries. However, the path to seamless integration is riddled with complexities unique to the multifamily housing sector. Donald Davidoff goes deeper into understanding these integration challenges and strategic imperatives through the lens of the multifamily real estate industry.

In a data-driven landscape, real estate organizations struggle with the need to create a single source of trust from a wide variety of systems of record in their tech stack, including property management systems, revenue management platforms, marketing and online reputation management tools, HRIS, CRM and so forth. Unlike many other industries, multifamily real estate has not yet gotten over the hurdles stemming from fragmented data sources and the complex nature of all of these disparate transactional systems. These challenges require meticulous attention to detail, technical expertise, and domain-specific knowledge to ensure data accuracy, consistency, and relevance.

If we're building a credit screening app, and we just need a tiny little bit of data through an API, that's pretty simple. But for business intelligence, we need a whole lot of data."
- Donald Davidoff

Customization emerges as a key theme in addressing integration challenges. Donald emphasizes the importance of tailoring data platforms to accommodate industry- and even company-specific metrics, workflows, and regulatory requirements. By aligning integration strategies with organizational objectives and operational realities, real estate professionals can enhance the efficacy and relevance of their BI initiatives.

Successful integration efforts hinge on collaboration between IT and business stakeholders. This cross-functional alignment fosters communication, streamlines integration processes, and mitigates implementation risks. By cultivating a culture of collaboration, organizations can leverage the collective expertise of both teams to drive successful integration outcomes. More crucially, it's important that BI initiatives be business-led and tech-enabled. In his more than 20 years of experience with multifamily housing data initiatives, Donald's experience is that IT-led initiatives rarely get the desired results while business-led projects have a much higher success rate.

Looking ahead, Donald advocates for an approach to integration that is much more open architecture than many legacy vendors currently support. Whether through direct queries, APIs or simple transmission of flat files, data "should flow like water." Many other industries have embraced the idea that making data easier to share creates a rising tide that will lift all boats. Multifamily housing isn't quite there yet, and industry CIOs and COOs should be more demanding of their technology vendors to enable such capabilities.

Navigating integration challenges in real estate BI requires marrying a deep understanding of the technical tools available in contemporary data platforms with keen insights into what is most important to asset managers and operators. Data and BI initiatives with only the first lead to platforms that look impressive on the surface but don't really meet enough of the needs of users; while those with great subject matter expertise but insufficient technical skills end with clunky data models that are hard to extend beyond a few simple user stories.

When in-depth subject matter expertise (and experience) is married with great data modeling and data visualization, the power of data is unleashed as all associates become able to make smarter decisions more quickly. That drives NOI!