Propidex -- Fighting the Battle of Data Integration

Straddling Property Information Silos... Property owners with large-scale portfolios face significant challenges in how to connect various islands of data.  Accounting ledgers, CAD drawings, lease abstracts, rent rolls and tenant occupancy information typically reside in separate software applications.  Until recently, getting the data to make relational sense was delegated to the realm of diligent asset managers.  Spreadsheets had to be manually updated or generated from Excel imports to incorporate statistics from the various software sources.  Data integration was a time-consuming task -- especially when trying to "slice and dice" a portfolio by various subset parameters to make leasing decisions.

Deloitte & Touche has joined forces with an innovative real estate software maker, d.e.m. property solutions, to form propidex.   Together, they have created software that offers data integration for mid to large-scale real estate portfolios.   Propidex's client server version, my.propidex, provides a means to aggregate, analyze and visually display entire portfolios of information on the desktop environment.  The system is designed on a customized basis since it integrates data from diverse property management systems -- such as CTI, Dyna, JD Edwards, MRI, Newstar and SAP.  As such, the implementation costs make economic sense for major owners with properties in excess of 10 million square feet.  Current propidex users include pension funds, REITs and other significant property management companies such as The Mills Corporation, Vornado, Equity Office Properties Trust, Ivanhoe and Jones Lang LaSalle.

Last week, propidex's Business Development Manager, Mary Kureluk mkureluk@propidex.com gave me a demo via PlaceWare.  The graphic interface that created instant bar and pie charts showing occupancy levels, future vacancies and rent statistics for both individual assets or entire cross-sections of the portfolio (based on region, type, size or other such field sorts) was nifty.  Propidex will help an owner's leasing team to anticipate upcoming space fluctuations.  In this rapidly degrading real estate environment, propidex could prove to be a valuable tool to more closely manage risk for increasingly liquid portfolios.

--Eileen Circo