I’ve noticed something interesting about growth in commercial real estate. The closer people are to the work, the harder it is to align the value they create with organizational objectives.
For example, last week we demonstrated our financial performance platform to a finance team. Everyone on the team was looking at the same solution, but each group saw it solving different problems.
The property accountants saw a replacement for an NOI variance worksheet that simplified but closely mirrored their existing work.
The VP Finance saw three days of executive reporting simplified every month and a finance function that could finally scale.
The CFO saw the first building block of a financial operating layer that becomes more valuable with every reporting cycle and a new way to support executive strategy.
None of them were wrong.
What struck me was not how little changed for the property accountants. It was how much became possible for everyone else – in this case a single connected workflow set the foundation for better budgeting, forecasting, operational cost analysis, and investor reporting.
Each successive improvement compounds value and improves organizational capacity.
To me, that’s one of the biggest opportunities in commercial real estate: system changes that introduce minimal disruption at the source of the work but establish connected value chains and create operating capacity that grows faster than the portfolios they support.
