Real Estate Auditor Case Study

The Problem

The Real Estate Auditor was created for a Fortune 100 company which held significant investments in thousands of real estate assets throughout the world.  Even though real estate was not the company’s main line of business, every investment required an audit and valuation to be performed by third party auditors (KPMG, Deloitte & Touche, PwC, etc.) twice a year. 

Each auditor utilized their own models and methodologies to audit and value the various properties resulting in:

• extremely high cycle times at a significant cost to the client

• low data integrity, accuracy and consistency

• the absence of consolidated analyses

Most methodologies used did not meet the rules set forth by the client and there were no opportunities to consolidate information or perform any “apples to apples” analyses. 

The Solution

We created an all-inclusive automated software application that incorporated all of the rules and thresholds set out by the client.  The flexible application allowed administrators to alter rules and thresholds within the system as required.  The application was used by the third party auditors in the field to gather information and perform analyses and our client used the application to consolidate, track and analyze all of the information on the various properties.

Results and Benefits

The application forced the auditors to use a standardized methodology which eliminated massive amounts of duplication and allowed for consolidation of information on the spot.  The time and cost savings were enormous.  The average time required to audit and value an asset dropped from over 5 hours to roughly one hour and the cost per audit dropped from over $1000 per asset to $200 per asset.  The auditors were no longer struggling to meet time deadlines and the client is now able to perform analyses across all assets with confidence.  Even though the immediately visible and measurable benefit of the tool to the client is several million dollars per year in value, there is greater value derived from the analyses that the tool provide to the organization on an ongoing basis.  The client can now perform important year-over-year analyses using standardized data fields and base their decisions on high-integrity data.  It is difficult to measure the exact amount of value that the organization derives from making a confident decision as a result of the software, but from what our client tells us, this value is much higher than the visible dollar value associated with the cost and time savings.  The cost to build the application software was a mere fraction of the value that it brought to the organization, so the return on investment (ROI) was astronomical.