Case Study | Digital Transformation in Commercial Real Estate: Streamlining EMEA Valuations Process

Client Information

Our consultants worked with a large and leading commercial real estate business to digitally transform their EMEA valuations business.

The Challenge

The current-state valuation process was highly manual, with different systems and tools used across different countries. Data was not collected in a consistent way and was hidden in documents such as Word and Excel. This limited the client's ability to reuse the data and use it to drive analytics and decision-making at an EMEA level.

Our Approach

We worked with the EMEA Transformation team to develop a process transformation and portfolio delivery playbook. This playbook created consistency in the approach and best practices that could be shared across other transformation initiatives. We then worked hand in hand with the valuations leadership team through four steps: Define, Discover, Design, Transformation Planning and Business Case. We co-created the future-state design and introduced opportunities to digitally transform the valuations process and business through multiple improvement levers such as standardization, simplification, RPA, intelligent automation, and new technology. Opportunities were identified for every step in the valuations process (Lead-Win, Job Set-Up, Client Valuation Intake, Comparable, Inspection, Valuation Modelling, Valuation Reporting, Billing). Opportunities included: Improved CRM integration, document automation, centralised workflow management and platform, valuation data preparation via RPA and APIs, automated valuation modeling, and standard reporting.

We took into account the current maturity of the service to sequence opportunities across four phases:

1. Phase 1: Increase Change Visibility and Sharing of Best Practice across countries
2. Phase 2: Workflow Management and Tactical Improvements
3. Phase 3: Incremental Technology Improvements
4. Phase 4: Advanced Features and Intelligent Automation

The phased approach ensured the basics and foundations were in place before introducing more complex innovations.

We conducted a vendor selection to assess suitable vendors for a new valuation platform and workflow management.

We then documented a business case with the investment required to deliver the future-state process and transformation roadmap over three years.

The Outcome

1. Sign-off of the Business Case and Transformation Plan from EMEA Leadership.
2. Selection of a vendor to deliver the centralised V&A platform.
3. Identified 10% productivity benefits across the valuations business.