The Power of Your Owned Portfolio

When we speak with real estate investors, especially firms with large portfolios of owned assets, they often tell us that they wish they could make better use of the insights to be gleaned from their portfolio when screening and underwriting potential investments. After all, the detailed, accurate, real-time information available on the buildings firms already own is vastly more useful than the sparse and often outdated comps provided by brokers or downloaded from data providers.

When we consider the advantages of owned portfolio data, three key points emerge:

1. The unparalleled detail and reliability it offers compared to market comps. For instance, not understanding the methodology behind market comps can present a risk to your underwriting.

2. The strategic edge gained from sourcing new investments in markets where assets are already held. Using your own assets for comparison taps into direct market experience.

3. The importance of consistency in underwriting assumptions, ensuring new acquisitions are not evaluated more optimistically than current holdings. These current holdings serve as a benchmark, keeping your underwriting assumptions rooted in reality.

Ultimately, when Deal Teams maintain this data so that it can be easily accessed, it becomes easier to benchmark underwriting assumptions against the firm’s historical performance, validate the financial viability of potential deals, and ensure a fit within the existing portfolio. This strategic approach is especially crucial when managing a diverse array of opportunities across different asset classes and geographies.

Challenges

Several challenges hinder the effective use of owned asset data when underwriting new deals.

1. Disparate Transaction Data: Transaction details and property-level data about owned assets are often stored across various platforms, from emails and PDFs to spreadsheets. This dispersion complicates the ability to compare new opportunities against the existing portfolio effectively.

2. Isolated Operating Metrics: Vital operating metrics, crucial for underwriting new deals, frequently remain isolated within Asset Management Teams. This division creates barriers to leveraging owned asset metrics, leading to an underutilization of valuable data.

3. Manual Data Entry: Manually compiling data and creating a comparative analysis between ongoing deals and owned assets demands an excessive amount of time and effort.

Solution

Origin’s robust Data Service easily integrates real-time market insights and detailed asset data into the decision-making process, ensuring Acquisition Teams have immediate access to the latest operating metrics and comprehensive asset information. The service also connects the detailed insights from owned assets with broader market data, providing a unified platform for both market and owned-asset comparisons. This eliminates the silos that traditionally hindered information sharing and provides a holistic view of the investment landscape, with the result being a more informed, agile, and strategic team that can act with confidence, backed by the most current and relevant data available.

Conclusion

By using Origin, investors are empowered to harness the full potential of their owned asset data, transforming it from a passive repository of information into an active tool for strategic decision-making. This, in turn, ensures that investments are not just made but are made wisely, with a clear understanding of their fit within the existing portfolio and their potential impact on future growth.