If you’re reading this blog you must be thinking to yourself, “My spreadsheets work just fine and have for years. Why would I even need software?”
Before we get to how commercial real estate asset management software can help you, let’s be clear that we certainly don’t want to deprive you of your coveted spreadsheets. Excel is great. We all use it, it’s been around forever, and it still can help anyone working in a CRE asset management role. However, spreadsheets can only take you so far. Eventually, you’ll hit the proverbial spreadsheet wall. Everyone does, so don’t feel bad. But first, let’s look at the issues you face with spreadsheets.
The real issues with using spreadsheets for CRE Asset Management
Here are a few challenges we’ve learned from anyone using spreadsheets for CRE asset management that can lead to avoidable issues with customers, managers, and investors.
Security and Control
The first challenge for anyone using spreadsheets for CRE Asset Management is they take a lot of effort to safeguard and maintain quality control. Different people on your team may be in and out of them all the time, such as trying to make quick updates. That’s when mistakes happen. We’re all human, so mistakes are unavoidable.
Spreadsheets break
As you well know, sometimes they break a lot. If you ask spreadsheets to do too much, such as manage enormous sets of data, they can mysteriously fail you when you need them the most.
Time and effort
Spreadsheets can take a lot of effort to search and find exactly what you’re looking for as well as input data. With automated software, you can instead have the answers come directly to you.
Using software to harness your data CRE Asset Management data
As you know in today’s CRE lending environment your data is invaluable. When data is siloed across spreadsheets, departments, offices, systems, and users you are less likely to do your job efficiently and effectively. That’s where cloud-based commercial real estate asset management software comes in to play to structure, organize, and fully realize the power of your own data. The benefits include:
- Full support for the life of a loan
- Support all kinds of CRE lenders
- Manage more complex CRE products
- Cloud-based software to reduce IT investments
- Save time and be more efficient through automation
To sum it up, spreadsheets have a role in CRE Asset Management, but in today’s CRE industry they’re simply not enough.
