clients / case studies / businesses
Apartment Realty Advisors
Goal
Investigate and compare leading solutions for an internal application for use by their realty managers
Solution
Reviewed requirements, industry best-of-breed commercial options, custom options, price and return on investment
Results
Introduction
Apartment Realty Advisors (ARA) is the largest privately held, full-service investment advisory brokerage firm in the nation that focuses exclusively on the multihousing industry.ARA, with offices in major cities across the nation, was using a variety of disparate software applications and procedures to capture and retain data. Their solutions for capturing and retaining property data, contact data, and historical data differed substantially between offices, and often was not automated. Typical offices had thousands of contacts (sometimes tens of thousands), and thousands of properties. The data quality was substantially different, also, and suspect in several locations.
What did we do?
- Documented the current issues
- Diagrammed the most critical processes’ data flows
- Described the key requirements
- Identified roles and permissions
- Identified external data interfaces, on a per-site basis
- Made security and availability recommendations
- Discussed data conversion/migration issues
- Predicted desirable future functionality
- Analyzed Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) solutions, identifying pro’s and con’s of each
- Reviewed and summarized functionality
- Measured alternate solutions under load conditions
- Reviewed technical specifications required to operate the system
- Reviewed support options
- Identified price
- Recommended to ARA business process enhancements
- Made recommendations
- Provided current expense summaries and projected Return on Investment estimates