Fund Management Tips

Terry Gowan, Yardi

By Joel Nelson on Aug 17, 2016 in News

Property fund management, by its very nature, is a complicated undertaking.

Fund managers can avoid the more egregious pitfalls of the business by following a few ground rules, according to Terry Gowan, regional director of Australia and New Zealand sales for Yardi^®.

“With a little planning, you can save staff time, ensure data reliability, meet compliance requirements, satisfy investors and tenants.  And making effective use of technology that delivers real-time visibility into investors, funds, investments, properties, opportunities and clients is another good strategy,” says Gowan, who works closely with almost half of Australia’s top performing real estate investment trusts and presents at property fund management industry events.

Here are Terry’s top tips for successful fund management:

• Invest in an industry-specific system. “Get your fundamental accounting, processes and procedures correct from the start.  Custom-made software systems are never cheaper than off-the-shelf systems designed for your industry.  Use what the most successful of your peers are using and duplicate it with a provider that can stand the test of time.”

• Don’t go cheap. “Make sure the system you choose can deal with intercompany transactions, fees, ownership structures, foreign exchange, and properties.  Avoid low-end options that aren’t efficient for these and other aspects of property and real estate investment management.”

• Establish an audit trail for financials. “Capturing low-level transactional data that reconciles every month is crucial to being auditable for compliance purposes.”

• Put everything into your database that you possibly can, while limiting disparate systems. “When the central source of truth for your data resides in a single database, you’ll have visibility from the fund through to the tenant, any time you need it.  This approach avoids the manual labor and potential data loss associated with using interfaces and/or data warehouses or multiple custom reports to piece together a holistic view.  Spreadsheet, document and email applications might initially seem like easy options, but they’re build for communication and presentations—not property or fund management.  Along these lines, fund managers should be leery of assets in their portfolios whose property management and accounting are performed by third parties outside the core system.  Manage internally, while allowing third-party logins on a selective basis.”