Essentially, it means using all the data your organization has collected across your tech stack to make smart, timely, fast, educated decisions that drive impact and profitability for your portfolio, rather than making a decision because you thought it was the right move, you felt like it could move the needle, or you saw someone else do something similar.

An EBDM culture starts with asking the RIGHT questions, not just the easy ones you’ve asked in the past, like “What’s my current occupancy?” If you’re going to have an impactful 2023, you need to go deeper. Get smarter and more intentional with your questions. BI can help!

Here’s how leaders can use business intelligence (BI) to ask insightful questions about their multifamily portfolios:

1. Gather relevant data from key areas into a single source of truth (SSOT): Use BI tools to collect and analyze data from key areas of your business such as operations, finance, marketing, leasing, etc. (PMS, ILS, Accounting software, Surveys, Google Analytics, Maintenance software...).

2. Highlight trends & patterns: Use data visualization tools to identify patterns and trends in the data that could be relevant to the business. Overlay those key data points onto your properties using tools like Engrain, for an even quicker way of seeing how things are trending.

3. Identify critical success factors (CSFs) for your business: We’ve identified 20 CSFs that rental housing stakeholders find important across the board. Most are not universal, however, there are 4 that all rental housing companies share. These CSFs serve as your North Star and align teams from the top down on what’s mission-critical when it comes to performance measurement.

4. Ask insightful questions: Encourage everyone across the organization to use the data and CSFs to formulate thoughtful, data-driven questions that can help leaders gain a deeper understanding of the business, identify areas of improvement, or celebrate the wins and replicate success stories.

Here are examples of great questions that leaders can start asking about their business today to increase profitability and growth for their portfolio this year.

• How are maintenance/service ticket times impacting renewals?
• Am I missing a revenue optimization opportunity with trade-outs?
• How are we performing against budget? Against reforecast?
• What is the value of a 10 points improvement in our survey scores?
• Which properties are the worst performing across my managed portfolio?

Access to all your great data in one central location helps multifamily leaders ask insightful questions about their business so you can unlock your aha moments and make better decisions, faster. We want you to start asking the RIGHT questions this year about your portfolio and dig into the nitty-gritty to truly leverage all of the data you have at your fingertips to outperform your competitors.