How fund managers can drive transparency with connected workflows

What’s driving the demand for a stronger narrative behind the numbers?

For today’s commercial real estate fund managers, valuation is no longer a periodic compliance exercise; it’s an ongoing, high-stakes conversation with investors.

Today’s complex market dynamics are fueling demand for more granular data, analytics, and transparency. To attract and retain capital, investment managers need as many quantitative measurements as possible to estimate of property's worth. At the same time, investors want more than just the final number. They want to understand how that number was derived.

Investors are demanding data rich explanations that connect portfolio level performance to individual assets, sub-markets, and even micro location dynamics. They want to see how changes in leasing, operating assumptions, or market comparables flow through to value, and they expect those answers quickly.

Overcoming major pain points

Evolving expectations are exposing key pain points: fragmented systems, manual inputs, and disconnected teams.

Fragmented systems mean your data lives in multiple places, in different formats. Manual inputs create bottlenecks and invite errors. Disconnected teams lead to inconsistent answers and slow response times when investors come calling.

The most time-consuming and risky aspects of manual workflows are stitching together data sets. You want to tell the full story of what you’re seeing. But when you try to manually merge data from point A and point B, each of which is in a different format, that takes time, effort, and it creates opportunity for error.

When an investor asks why a portfolio’s value shifted, can you provide that answer quickly and with confidence? Or are you scrambling to manually track down which of your 200 properties across multiple markets drove the change? Slow or uncertain responses to investor inquiries can hinder reporting and undermine trust.

Creating connected workflows

Understanding what drives a change in portfolio value can be a significant challenge for fund managers who don’t have the right technology. The solution is to create connected workflows that deliver efficiency, transparency, and defensibility.

Scalable tech solutions strengthen valuation workflows by enhancing data management and analysis, strengthening communication, and aligning processes with goals. As the industry gets better at recalibrating what matters in a property valuation, it’s also becoming more effective at measuring the magnitude of these elements.

Technological advances in AI and machine learning, along with the integration of data into centralized systems, now enable the processing of vast types and amounts of property data. These developments enable fast, detailed analysis down to the sub-asset level. Studying fresh, granular data such as listings, sales and lease comparables, occupancy, and demographics, reveals subtle changes in factors influencing property value that were previously difficult to collect, reconcile, and analyze.

Leveraging scalable tech

Using the right technology to address pain points doesn’t just make valuation faster; it makes it better. Creating connected workflows requires scalable tech solutions that strengthen valuation workflows by enhancing data management and analysis, strengthening communication, and aligning processes with goals.

ARGUS Intelligence consolidates and centralizes your data, surfacing property and portfolio insights that enhance your analysis. It acts as the engine behind your valuations, providing the modeling environment and data you need to produce consistent, high-quality results while also delivering critical market context by tapping into Altus Group’s US property valuation dataset. This enables you to benchmark your assets and portfolios against anonymized peer groups and market trends, giving your team confidence in how your results stack up.

By connecting valuation workflows with scalable technology, transparency shifts from an operational challenge to a true competitive advantage. And fund managers are empowered to deliver valuations that are faster, defensible, and trusted by investors at every level.

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