Real Estate

Rethink corporate real estate and property management for the digital world. Get the insights you need to expertly manage your enterprise real estate operations with a state-of-the-art user experience that gives you a clear view of space utilization, facility costs, global portfolio compositions, and financial performance – all in real time

• Cloud deployment
• Real-time integration with SAP ERP and SAP S/4HANA
• Real-time analysis
• Compliance with IFRS and US-GAAP standards

The sub-prime mortgage crisis may be a fading memory (or it may not), but for many companies, managing their real estate assets continues to be a challenge. Just how big of a challenge do some companies have?

SAP Flexible Real Estate Could Handle This
Imagine you’re the owner of a railroad, perhaps one that started operations in the 1800s or even earlier. Over the years, you acquired various pieces of real estate, some of it long, like what a rail road track goes on, some of it, well, some of it, you may have lost track of.
Now, I am just a simple homeowner, and have never lost track of one of my houses, though I have lost track of a 401k account before (don’t panic, I found it).
But I recently heard from one of our partners that works in the real estate space that one of their clients had in the neighbourhood of 77,000 thousand parcels of land and other real estate, a significant portion of which they were not collecting rent on or even aware they owned.
I routinely see this situation, a company that has from a few properties to perhaps thousands of properties, and they don’t quite have it under control.

What are some the key issues they are typically facing:

• Property deeds that are all paper based, which may date from a 100 years ago
• Disputed property lines, this is especially prevalent in places like the Middle East
• Plans for major development but no existing business processes to manage the finished project
• A need to manage existing clients, who may change rapidly
• Complex need to manage site utilities
• Deciding on whether to install utility meters for individual retail units versus entire areas, such as airports
• How to maximize the use of buildings over a specific area
• What is owned and in what form

• These are just some of the questions encountered when trying to manage complex real estate, and one of the reasons the SAP Flexible Real (SAP REFX) estate solution was developed.
• As it happens, I have been doing a course on Real Estate Investment Management, which is mostly an excel exercise. It has been very helpful from the standpoint of how to valuate and possibly price and sell a property.
• But the tougher real estate management issues, such as those I mentioned earlier, really require some sophisticated software and complex integration into GIS or Geographical Information Systems for today’s corporate Real Estate managers to be successful.
• As a big data analytics focused firm, we are able to build advanced, interactive dashboards which extract information from the various modules that SAP RE-FX integrates, which you can see in this little diagram, is virtually all of them!

What we see soon is an integration of SAP RE-FX, Linear Asset Management, various 3rdparty system providers and mobile applications that will provide various functionalities required to successfully manage commercial real estate.
If you are currently struggling with real estate, or contemplating making major investments, even perhaps looking to build entire cities, such as several outfits are doing around the world, then one final issue you will want to bring front and centre is data acquisition.
Remember those property records I mentioned that dated back nearly a century? Those will have to be digitized, mostly by hand, while using some advanced technology.
This is such a big issue that at least one country I have worked with is considering hiring thousands of people to do nothing but measure and record the dimensions of all their real estate during the next several years as the benefit of having their real estate under management assisted by SAP RE-FX outweighs the cost of the exercise (they really need a probe like you saw in the movie "Prometheus").

• SAP Flexible Real Estate (RE-FX) is a standard ECC installation - RE-FX is a suite of Real Estate Business Processes based on Best Business Practices.
• SAP RE-FX is made specifically for Real Estate businesses - RE-FX was made for professional and corporate real estate managers who manage land and buildings with Best Business Practices and all its complexity.
• RE-FX integration within SAP is Extensive with the following modules - Financials, Controlling, Assets Accounting, Lease Accounting, Plant Maintenance, Service Management, Human Resources, Customer Relationship Management, Business Warehouse and BOBJ for reporting and Dashboard.
• RE-FX Integration capabilities extend to the following - GIS/Maps: ESRI, Google, BING Drawing: AutoCAD, DMS: Document Management Systems, ASE: Advance Search Engine, Google Search, IWMS: Integrated Workplace Management System