Green ticks seek to solve a major problem in CRE data quality. That problem is data duplication.
The green ticking of data assets allows your data assets to “talk” to similar data assets outside of your business.
For example: you have a property known as “ABC Towers, New York” in your system. Over time you have added lots of images, attributes, and tenant information to the property.
Now the property fund that owns ABC Towers wants to feed its vacancies and image info into your system.
The property fund calls the same property “A B C Towers”. This is different to how you have named it.
Without the green-ticking exercise, the following would happen
- Property fund would look to see if “A B C Towers” is in your system. The property fund would not find “A B C Towers”.
- Property fund would add “A B C Towers” into your system. Therefore creating a duplicate to the existing “ABC Towers, New York”.
- Property fund would then add the vacancies and latest images to their version of “A B C Towers”.
Now you have a problem
- “ABC Towers, New York” doesn’t have the vacancy info you want (and latest and greatest images)
- Similarly, “A B C Towers” doesn’t have your images, attributes and tenant information.
- And you have two versions of the same property
- And now you need to merge those versions
Instead of the property fund helping you (which was their good intention), they have created a problem – requiring lots of work to solve.
How green ticking helps
- Green tick your “ABC Towers, New York” property. This green ticking process identifies it as the same property as “A B C Towers” sitting property fund side
- Once the green ticking is complete, turn on the property fund feed
- The property fund looks to see if “A B C Towers” is in your system. Property fund finds that it is (albeit under a different name – “ABC Towers, New York”)
- Property fund then feeds its vacancies and images into “ABC Towers, New York”
- No duplicates are created, and no data merging and deduplication is required
- You can now trust that your vacancies data will be kept up to date by the property fund, and any new, relevant information will be sent through
Green ticks (advanced)
But what about your high-quality data getting over-ridden by the property funds?
Isn’t there a risk you can lose information because it is replaced by the property fund?
This is handled in this way. Every field (such as GLA value, property name, street address etc.) in your data asset has two states
- Your custom version
- The property fund’s version
Depending on the field
- The property fund’s version “wins” and over-writes
- An example of this is the asking rental on a unit or a vacant unit’s GLA
- With this information, the property fund, as the single version of data truth wins
- Your custom version “wins” (being layered over the property fund/owner version)
- An example of this is your property description
- Here there is a strong business case for (and limited risk in) your version of the data to over-ride that of a property fund
If you delete your custom version on a data field, you will see the property fund’s version beneath. The property fund’s version is always there.
How do green ticks work?
Green ticks hinge on a data asset’s unique identifier. For example, a woman may choose to change her last name when she marries to that of her husband. Susan Shabangu can change to Susan Jones. However, her ID number will always remain the same. The same applies with unique identifiers for properties, units, businesses and contacts.
In green ticking a data asset, you have to bind that asset to its unique identifier. This can require, in certain instances, a fair amount of “playing detective” – using clues the data asset provides to deduce what the actual data asset is.
