Taking the Long View on Real Property

At VISTA, we understand the frustration that many agency executives feel because of the lack of enterprise-class commercial off-the-shelf software for real property asset management.

Real property professionals have long realized that they could greatly improve their financial reporting by being able to view their holdings across their entire agency.

For financial executives who have only recently been asked to look at real property in the context of financial performance and mission fulfillment, it's important to understand that having that broad view enables an organization to reduce waste, improve workplace efficiency, and better support its mission.

Is there really an operational down side to not having an enterprise-level view of your real property holdings? Let's ask a few questions:

How Is Your Financial Performance Affected?

At home, almost everyone uses Quicken, MS Money or a similar program for personal finances. These applications enable you to report spending against budgets and then drill through the information to view individual spending categories, even individual transactions. Can you do that for your entire organization?

How Is Your Space Utilization Affected?

Consider this example: If you have two organizations in the same metropolitan area, one having an excess 20,000 square footage and another having an unfulfilled requirement for the same, can your organization quickly recognize that parallel, reconcile the portfolio and reallocate buildings?

How is Your Budget Management Affected?

At individual buildings, operations staff know exactly what will happen if funding is incrementally reduced: Non-essential services must be eliminated, maintenance must be deferred, and so on.

At the portfolio level, can your organization quickly and reliably forecast the mission performance impacts of cuts to your operations funding? In other words, what happens to your mission fulfillment if your budget is reduced by 2%, 5%, 10%, 30%, etc.? Can you forecast at what point budget decreases will cause your organization to fail to meet its mission?

While there is no single COTS solution, no silver bullet, for managing real property at the portfolio level, that does not diminish the need for or the advantages of taking the long view. Real property asset management means making sense of mountains of raw data, and turning that data into sound, validated information.

That kind of information translates into real decision support - to help you make faster and easier choices about the best use of your assets for your organization's mission fulfillment and financial performance.

Don't let a lack of COTS solutions prevent you from taking the long view on real property.


David Baxa
President and CEO
VISTA