It’s time to write your monthly or quarterly property/portfolio reports, or your CEO/CFO wants an ad hoc report that day; which are standard, seemingly easy tasks for Real Estate professionals. But before you know it, it’s an hour or two later. You’ve wasted precious time trawling through multiple systems, phoning different departments, and manually entering details into Excel spreadsheets. All this so you can crunch your data and gain insights into what’s going on within your own portfolio. Phew, time for a coffee.

Sound familiar? You’re not alone…

Searching for information

Wasting time searching for information is by no means a quandary that’s exclusive to the Real Estate profession. Data from IDC shows that the average knowledge worker spends about two and a half hours per day searching for information. So, you could be wasting nearly a third of your working time just looking for information.

“Manually gathering information on properties is time consuming.” says Olly Freedman, Regional Director, Europe at Retransform. “Within the RE industry, information is often housed in a variety of systems and locations. This ranges from original underwriting details during the acquisition phase, to operational data measuring performance, to predictive analytics based on the disparate sources of data.”

Limited visibility across siloed systems not only takes up your time but can also lead to mistakes. If you’re manually compiling disparate information to make forecasts, then your mistakes could have costly consequences, for you and your clients. Thankfully, there’s a solution…

It’s time for answers

You’re probably familiar with digital assistants like the Amazon Alexa-powered Echo or Siri, built into iPhones and Apple devices, which have become increasingly popular with both consumers and businesses. In fact, at the close of 2020 there were over 4.2 billion digital voice assistant devices in use worldwide, according to Juniper Research.

Voice assistants are powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) to search databases and save time by finding and extracting information for you using sophisticated algorithms. The technology uses voice analytics software to capture what you’re asking them, and then uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to interpret the question and provide answers.

“Fundamentally, the biggest benefit of a voice assistant is the speed by which you can get answers. These questions might otherwise have taken multiple calls to various people or departments to retrieve the right information,” says Bhavin Shah, Vice President, North America & Asia Pacific at Retransform.

Meet your new, time-saving assistant

40% of businesses plan to adopt voice technology by 2021 (Computer World) and they can be used to improve efficiency and productivity in the workplace in a variety of ways.

A voice assistant is easy to set up and use; and for Real Estate professionals, it’s certainly easier than managing multiple databases and Excel spreadsheets. It does all the hard work for you in your day-to-day tasks, so you can focus your time on more valuable efforts, such as connecting with your clients or customers, whether in-person or virtually.

The 4see platform uses voice analytics which can be synced with your Amazon Alexa or other assistant hardware, providing you with real time, immediate access to information that is essential to the decision-making process, simply by asking a question.

You could ask Alexa to give you details of lease expirations, and drill into property data, such as your highest performing properties. You can then request that Alexa emails you over the details so you can upload it straight into your reports.

See how easy it is to get instant access to information in the video below, as our European director, Olly Freedman, gives a demonstration of how 4see analytics helps you save valuable time in your everyday tasks.

Written by Claire Vanner