What Should a Good Real Estate Dashboard Cover?

With an overall increase of 6.5 percent in U.S. housing stock in 2017 alone, the last couple of years have been robust for real estate market of USA.

Keeping up with the trend, real estate developers and firms are leaving no stone unturned to completely revamp their management systems either through ongoing tracking of portfolio & performance or using unique approaches, methods and styles. The end result is to meet the required due diligence standards as well as customers’ expectations.

Real Estate Dashboards are an excellent tool for developers that can assist real estate professionals in multiple areas including-

• Dashboard reporting– Allows collating and reporting information and other essential metrics used in real estate industry in an easy to interpret format such as graphs, tables, charts, diagrams, etc.
• Allow the professionals to gain deep insights into various aspects of operating and financial data used in real estate business.
• Dashboard help the real estate managers accurately measure and monitor various Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of business including property acquisition, outstanding debt, occupancy rates, collection factor, tenant turnover, utilities, maintenance & repair, average days to lease, net operating income, etc
• Excellent solution for improving expenses tracking that helps in managing key business areas leading to high profits and growing Net Operating Incomes (NOI)
• Enhances the overall productivity of the business by tracking other essential customer specific parameters such as the percentage of NOI margins, Debt Yield, crucial trends like the Rental Income, Net Operating Income, etc

What are the Features that a Good Real Estate Dashboard should have?

As a real estate professional, whether you want to create a robust customer base by offering the best customer service or enhance the sales force productivity across segments including property management and real estate investment trusts, Real Estate Dashboard is a great option that comes loaded with excellent features and ease of usability.

If you’re looking for robust business dashboard reporting, some of the essential features that a good real estate business dashboard should have are discussed below-

Firstly, it must be a real estate metrics dashboard and not an ordinary dashboard

a) The Convenience of Tracking Various Real-Estate Parameters

Among the essential ones include-

1. Financial Details

Dashboard reporting solutions should offer easy monitoring of the core financial information including-

• Key expenses such as Net Operating Income (NOI), Real Estate taxes, available cash flow, accrued expenses, mortgage, utilities, etc
• Details of various incomes such as rental income, Net Income, etc
• Other essential financial parameters such as collection factor, vacancy, utilities per sq ft/per unit
• Other expenses including a detailed comparison of budgeted and YTD values

2. Vacancy Details

The business intelligence dashboard should also provide the ease of tracking vacancy as well as rental income details including the following essentials-

• Percentage of occupancy in the property such as the number of units vs. number of vacant units
• The cost of vacancy for the month
• Details about the number of units with occupants either moved out or going to move followed by a notice
• Detailed income chart including the gross rent, vacancy loss, net collected rent, etc
• Other renewal and collection factors

b) Dashboard Time-frame

As per the customized requirement of the business, the Real estate dashboards should offer the ease of data tracking through daily, monthly, quarterly or yearly data. Essentially, the required timeline depends on the kind of data to be monitored. For e.g.: financial parameters are often tracked every month, quarter or year whereas the operational data require daily or weekly tracking.

Whichever dashboard you choose, it should be consistent in tracking as per required parameters & formats for better management and faster results.

The real estate metrics dashboard must also be updated regularly along with changes being made in the policies and laws. 

c) Security

The safe & secure transaction is another essential requirement in any real estate dashboard to look for. A good Real Estate Dashboard should allow the users to collect information in such a manner that offers an increased level of security by limiting the chances of errors, fraud, error, and loss of data

d) Simple and Easy 

It is extremely important to have a simple real estate management dashboard with a basic layout. People often ignore this aspect and in order to have a fancy-looking dashboard forget to keep it user-friendly. Users should be able to understand the interface of the dashboard and it should be convenient for the employees to work on it.

Conclusion

There is no denying the fact that well-made Real Estate Business Dashboards can be instrumental in managing different aspects of the real estate industry including detailed analysis of the portfolio, keeping track of essential property parameters, and overall management of the business.

The choice of a good dashboard with excellent features can allow the property professionals to access and interpret data in real-time thereby giving a clear competitive advantage of reading data trends and identifying the problem areas with key performance indicators (KPIs) for fast & better decision making. Also, try to form a section of FAQs in the metric dashboard.

Good Property management dashboards will also help real estate companies to speed up things and save time. This will also help them expand better by paying attention to new ventures and collaborating with other clients. There are a number of developers providing some great Business intelligence dashboards for property management, choose the one that suits you and your target audience.