Business Intelligence for Student Housing: A Game Changer Arrives

True story: a property manager recently shared that she had broken down in tears when shown how RealPage Business Intelligence for Student Housing could crank out in 10 minutes the reports she had been manually assembling from dozens of individual property spreadsheets—requiring as many as 20 painful hours, a lot of it during her free time. Business Intelligence (BI) has finally arrived for managers of student housing, and it’s changing everything about how decisions are made and performance is monitored. It gives you an instant lens into the student housing data that’s important to you in your particular job, without having to pull diverse data together into reports, waiting for someone else to create them for you, or trying to gain insights directly from rows and columns of numbers. This technology consolidates all your data at the property, regional and portfolio levels in a single platform, allowing you to slice, dice and view the data any way you want to—in many cases, in the form of eye-opening charts and graphs. This includes both financial and operational data, no longer locked in separate silos but flowing in from every direction to a central database where it’s ready to be extracted according to the particular needs and interests of managers and partners at every level. The walls come tumbling down Your operational data is housed in different systems depending on function. Service requests are in one place; lease expirations in another; wait list and returning student data in another, and so on. Then there are your KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) such as revenue, expenses, NOI, rent growth and preleased/current occupancy—metrics critical to your company’s decision makers. The beauty of BI is that it lets you choose the operational and financial data important to you, then culls this information from wherever it resides and displays it in graphic format on a custom dashboard that keeps you on top of e...