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Real estate consultants working in both private and public sectors rely on data to inform their advice to clients. Often that data is provided by the client, but that doesn’t mean it’s complete or accurate.

A common issue that Mandy Hansen, RI, of Insight Specialty Consulting encounters is in financial statements. Building owners may “combine financial statements for several assets into one report so individual asset performance is not readily established. This makes it difficult to determine which assets, if any, should be redeveloped, sold, or retained. It is also difficult to compare assets within a portfolio to rank and prioritize optimization initiatives.”

Data challenges range from gaps in financial data to ownership determinations, yet such challenges don’t prevent decision making. “In a surprising number of engagements, the gaps cannot be filled—the data doesn’t exist—so assumptions must be made,” notes Hansen. “If organizations waited for perfect data, then nothing would ever happen.”

Download Summer 2017

Land use decisions exist at the strategic portfolio level, the programmatic level, and the level of the site. Read more about the types of data needed for these types of consulting projects, and their challenges, in Mandy Hansen’s “Data for Land Use Decisions in Public and Private Partnerships,” in the Summer 2017 issue of Input, page 7. Download Summer 2017

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