01
Inventory the systems that hold data
PMS, accounting, CRM, maintenance, utilities, screening, and the spreadsheets that fill the gaps between them. A silo you haven’t named can’t be connected.
Apartment data silos are what you get when every system an operator runs keeps its own version of the truth. The property management system, the accounting package, the marketing tools, and the maintenance platform each hold part of the picture, and none of them share it. On this episode of Proptech Espresso, Elizabeth Braman, CEO and co-founder of Revolution RE, joins host Justin Hughes to talk about that dilemma and how connecting the technology an operator already runs gives them a holistic view of properties, tenants, and portfolios.
A business intelligence platform for professional rental owners, managers, and operators. A proprietary integration layer connects, collects, and aggregates data from the systems they already run, to support secure data storage, custom reporting, and predictive analytics. With that data in one place, operators view dashboards, create aggregated reports, and develop risk models to capitalize on trends, respond to unpredictability, and maximize NOI for their investors.
A data silo is a store of property information that only one system, one team, or one vendor can read. The rent roll lives in the property management system. The general ledger lives in accounting. Leads and tours live in the CRM. Work orders live in the maintenance platform, and utility usage lives with a billing vendor. Each is complete on its own terms and incomplete for the questions an owner asks. The dilemma in the episode’s title is that none of these systems is broken. The job of the portfolio, seeing properties, tenants, and financials together, just belongs to none of them.
Silos aren’t a sign of poor management. They follow from how rental technology is bought and built. A property management system is designed to run leasing and rent collection, an accounting package to close the books, and neither was designed to feed the other. Systems that do exchange data still disagree about what it means. One calls a unit a “1BR,” another “One Bedroom.” One counts a renewal on signature, another on move-in anniversary. That disagreement is the case for a multifamily-specific data model. Portfolios also accumulate systems: acquisitions bring properties on a different PMS, third-party managers bring their own stacks, and a new marketing platform gets added because it’s better, not because it integrates. And the vendor that holds the data has little reason to connect it. Exports are limited, APIs are inconsistent, and the analysis is worth more inside its own product. The results, mismatched numbers, delayed reports, and unanswered questions, are covered in why rental property data is such a mess.
The answer in the episode is connectivity across the technology an operator already runs, not replacing it. An integration layer does the work in stages.
PMS, accounting, CRM, maintenance, utilities, screening, and the spreadsheets that fill the gaps between them. A silo you haven’t named can’t be connected.
Extract data from each system through its API or export on a schedule, so the portfolio view no longer depends on someone remembering to pull a report.
Map every field to a single definition and structure. This is the step that turns connected data into comparable data. Our breakdown of the multifamily ETL process walks through extraction, transformation, and loading.
Standardized data lands in secure storage and is aggregated across properties, managers, and systems. Portfolio questions become queries instead of projects, and the answers stay consistent month to month because the definitions never change. Dashboards, reports, and risk models sit on top, and a business intelligence tool built for rental portfolios is only as useful as the data underneath it.
One view across systems answers the questions that move NOI: which properties are trending toward vacancy before it shows in the financials, which managers hit their numbers on identical definitions, where unpredictability is turning into risk. A risk model built on one system’s data models one system’s risk.
Investors feel it too. Reporting from silos means reconciling by hand every quarter and hoping the numbers agree. Reporting from connected, standardized data means the same figures every time, traceable to source. That’s the difference between a portfolio that explains itself and one that needs an analyst to explain it.
The conversation is from 2022 and the framing has held up. Property management system integration is still the bottleneck, and connecting existing infrastructure is still the practical route, because ripping out the systems that run a business is rarely an option. What has changed is how much more connected data can do once it exists.
On Audible, or through the button above.
A podcast hosted by Justin Hughes. This conversation was published on March 11, 2022.
The company was JoyHub when the episode was recorded and later became Revolution RE. The platform described on the show is the same one.
Connect and standardize the data your systems already produce, and replace silos with a portfolio you can actually see.
See plans and pricing