This leading real estate advisory company is based out of Alpharetta, Georgia, and it caters to real estate professionals, banks and institutional investors by providing them with market outlooks to drive client awareness around what opportunities that the market offers. Thanks to Power BI interactive visualizations, Orion significantly reduced the time and efforts required to generate reports and business insights.
Challenge
The company creates real estate market analyses and reports for real estate builders, banks (for loans) and institutional investors. Using Microsoft Excel, the staff creates reports on real estate Multiple Listing Service (MLS) information. Although using the spreadsheet was effective in conveying relevant information, it was not interactive enough for the end users. Also, Excel requires a substantial amount of manual effort – data collection, manipulation, cleansing and analysis.
Orion was asked to devise an automated data quality testing process with:
- A solution framework that automates processes for data collection and manipulation;
- A scalable reporting mechanism that provides customers and end-users with a rich, interactive reporting mechanism;
- A singular platform for managing content and data relevant to their internal business processes.
Solution
Orion proposed a solution that would host the data on a scalable technology platform; this solution was intended for internal staff and end users. Working with the company, Orion was able to better understand the business model and create a Microsoft-based solution that addressed the company’s problems in three segments:
- Power BI to help with reporting and visualization
- Microsoft Azure to host the data warehouse and analyze data
- SharePoint Online to provide interfaces to administer the platform
Impact
The company is now able to visualize real estate trends by extracting data-driven insights, which allows them to advise clients on the best places to invest money and build properties. In addition to saving time and money (using instant customer reports), more accurate data led to better industry insights and higher customer satisfaction.