Marketing Business Intelligence Why BI Alone Is Not Enough.pdf

Marketing Business

Intelligence: Why BI Alone Isn’t Enough

Erina Malarkey Remarkably, Co-Founder and CEO

The Landscape Today

Today, no one would deny that institutional multifamily operators need to have a property management system, or ‘PMS’. We all recognize and accept that solutions from Yardi, RealPage, MRI, Entrata, and ResMan, just to name a few, are core to running multifamily assets effectively and efficiently.

Same goes for a customer relationship management system, or ‘CRM’. This type of solution has also become standard as a means to successfully manage the lead to lease process at scale.

Fast forward to the conversation surrounding business intelligence, or ‘BI’ for multifamily and a growing early majority who are evolving how they run multifamily real estate with it. It makes sense that the largest asset class in the world would benefit from more data-driven decision making powered by data aggregation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

In fact, per a recent study reported at CRETech’s ‘Reimagining Real Estate Business Intelligence Summit’, BI is the #1 area of interest for the industry, with 87% of companies saying it is important.

Positive Steps

As a result, we are seeing more and more operators begin to explore BI solutions for their portfolio – an exciting and positive step for our industry as we move to make more informed decisions, earlier and more confidently than before.

However, across existing BI solutions, there is an important functional gap that leaves marketers’ needs unmet. Today’s vertical BI solutions have limited to no marketing BI and analytics functionality, a significant problem for Marketing, Leasing, and Asset Management teams responsible for achieving the acquisition, retention, occupancy, and NOI required to power this $3T+ industry.

The result?

Despite the fact that U.S. marketing ad spend among properties with inventory of 50+ units is more than $5B, multifamily marketers, responsible for some of the largest and most complex portfolios in the U.S., are still having to rely on manual data aggregation and analysis. This leads to retrospective and reactive firefighting, and opacity around truly understanding what marketing channels and tactics are producing the best results and how to further optimize to drive higher leasing revenue, more efficiently, at lower cost, with better ROI.

Total U.S. Marketing Ad Spend Among 50+ Unit Properties

“We have an enterprise BI solution for our company, but it doesn’t do anything for marketing. Our marketing dashboard is blank, and we aren’t feeling any of the love. We’re trying to produce exceptional outcomes for our owners, but with challenging conditions, tight budgets, and lean teams, we simply don’t have the tools we need to do our jobs as well as we could and should.”

An SVP at an NMHC Top 50 Manager

BI has the potential to transform multifamily asset strategies.

The purpose of BI software is to transform data into actionable insights that can inform and influence an organization’s business decisions. A BI tool accesses and analyzes data sets and surfaces analytical findings through charts, grids, summaries, dashboards, and reports. These assets provide users with intelligence about their business – in our industry, their portfolios and properties.

Existing multifamily BI solutions are largely focused on what have historically been seen as core drivers of the business: operations, facilities, and accounting.

Marketing has become a core driver of multifamily asset and business success, but the majority of the industry’s BI solutions haven’t caught up with this new reality.

This is truer today than ever before. An increasingly competitive multifamily landscape compounded by COVID-related constraints and challenges have recently made marketing a critical discipline in achieving portfolio goals.

Multifamily Marketing Teams Have Unique BI Needs

Marketing users need access to unique data sources, unique KPIs, unique calculations and insights.

For instance:

When you couple the needs of marketers, with the lack of marketing specific BI and compound that by the pain points and jobs to be done marketers face every day you begin to see the critical need emerging.

Consider the following – how many of these accurately reflect key jobs that must be done on a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis and corresponding pain points?

Jobs to Be Done, aka... Pain Points, aka...

I’m suffering from...

An essential function in multifamily asset management, Multifamily Marketing has lacked the essential tools.

Until now.

Remarkably, a multifamily marketing intelligence platform, is a powerful tool for multifamily teams who need to stay on top of marketing and leasing performance issues, risks, and opportunities.

Our platform provides data and context to inform smart decisions about actions and investments required to achieve and maintain portfolio and property performance.

Simply put, Remarkably helps multifamily marketers drive higher leasing revenue, more efficiently, at lower cost, with better ROI.

About The Author

Erina Malarkey

Erina Malarkey is the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Remarkably. She is responsible for the strategic vision and direction of the company’s cloud-based business intelligence software.

Bringing more than a decade of multifamily real estate expertise to her role, Erina has forged deep relationships within the multifamily industry and is recognized for her commitment to shifting the status quo of property performance. Her ability to define and meet the needs of the nation’s top managers, owner/operators, investors and developers with an intuitive and value-generating platform has been instrumental in Remarkably’s success.

Most recently, Erina was named one of GlobeSt Real Estate Forum’s 2020 Women of Influence for innovation in the multifamily industry. She also won the CREW Seattle 2019 Women in Tech award.