Why the Gmaven sync
In many instances, commercial real estate professionals, are like factory workers of old. However, instead of processing steel and cloth, we do the same, draining, repetitive and high-risk-of-error tasks on data.
Most of our days are spent far away from the work we love. Instead we are forced to spend time processing data. There are two reasons for this, and both are due to a lack of effective tools.
- Poor data management practices
- A lack of automation
The Gmaven sync helps to address this.
What is the Gmaven sync?
As discussed in the post in our FAQs (why CRE is different to resi), and this post unpacking a property’s complex data hierarchy, properties have a one to many relationship to units.
Said another way – like one parent can have many children, one property can have many vacant units.
The sync allows you to make one change at a property (parent) level, and for that change to push down to all the units (children).
I.e.
“the computer does the work”.
For example, you have a property with 10 vacant units. Those units are asking R190 / sqm gross rental. Your asking rental changes from R190 to R200 / sqm.
Instead of you having to go into 10 individual units, and make 10 individual changes, one by one, you change it once, at the property level. And the sync updates all 10 units (where gross rental at unit is marked to pull from parent) automatically.
(And yes, we have solved for the challenge where some units have different values 🙂 please see more below).
This sync doesn’t only work for asking gross and net rentals. It applies to
- Asking expense recoveries
- The classification of expense recoveries
- Tenant installation allowances
- Parking rentals and ratios
- Escalations
- Special offers and incentives
- Even property attributes
Another major benefit of the sync…
You enter information at the property level. Then you create a new unit. You don’t want to re-enter that information on the unit. But you do want that unit to take on all of the property level’s information. The Gmaven sync does this for you, automatically, on create. This automation brings unit create times down drastically. And improves the quality of your data.
How it works
Look at information at the parent level.
To see the status, hover over the sync button. Here we are looking at the sync status for expenses.
On this property there are no units (so no units can be synced):
Add a unit.
On manual unit create, all unit fields arrive synced (by default).
As with above, to see the status, hover over the sync button. Here we are checking out the unit’s sync status for the expenses field.
Add a unit.
Handling for exceptions
What happens if I have 10 vacant units, but one of them has a different asking rental, or expenses?
No problem.
On the unit that is different, you simply unsync the sync box. (Note, in the image below, we are looking at the unit level)
This means that it will never automatically update from the parent
Here you will see, on hover over the sync button at the property / parent level:
Don’t worry, you can use filter functionality like this to figure out if any of your units are out of date with the rest.
What about vacancy feeds / data switches
I am a property fund feeding vacancies into brokerages. What happens?
Only unit-level vacancies information is updated. This is because of
- the tendency for unit-level information to be different, and
- further to above, property-level financial information is irrelevant. (Good news, the engine that runs the brochures are smart enough to make sense of the unit-level data)
I am a brokerage receiving public vacancies. What happens?
- Apart from features, images and location info, property-level financial information is never updated (because this is pointless)
- Only unit-level information is updated.
All units arrive default unsynced. If you, as a broker, would like to add your own private vacancy info, you can use the property level information as per normal. This property-level info won’t over-ride your unsynced values in your unit-level fields.