Better Safe Than Sorry

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Let's go through a little imaginary story together. 

Assume you are a real estate broker who moved into a new town with no corporate offices. After a while, a large FMCG company started scouting for office space in your town. You understood their space requirement and matched it with a fitting commercial property and a local landlord got a tenant for the next few years. 

Over a few years, you closed numerous such deals, so now you are sitting on some very crucial and profitable data, from both the demand and supply sides. This would contain information on companies, key decision makers, their space design and the colour of the wallpaper the city head likes behind his chair. 

You also have a directory of properties, the deal specifics, local landlord information, upcoming supply and the times when these space leases are due for renewal. 

Audi, Here I Come

Hold on to your horse because what if that precious information you possess was stolen? All your power, granted to you by the ownership of that data would come under threat immediately. Heck, that's just about everything your business operates on. 

In today's competitive and aggressive marketplace, the loss of that data would mean that in a few months, you'd be thinking twice before booking an Ola. 

Moral of the story - In the commercial real estate industry, data can make or break you is CASH!

Data Security and Real Estate

In the modern age, data security is as crucial as personal security. 

In the real estate sector, investment decisions have always been and will always be driven by people with information, akin to the data you collected from our imaginary small town. 

Today, investors and service providers must effectively utilise gargantuan amounts of data to create and capture value in a complex and competitive marketplace.

Secure access to this key information is the critical pathway to operate at scale with speed and precision. Yet with increasing and expanding use of data assets, there are corresponding data liabilities and increasing cyber threats. 

This is the new balance sheet as the real estate business goes digital. 

Woah! That Sounds Serious

Yes. Cybersecurity and data protection today are the bedrock for building and protecting enterprise value in the commercial real estate industry. In fact, expertly managing information security risks is now minimally expected of institutional investors and fiduciaries. 

The stakes are high and thankfully, this is slowly getting the full attention of industry leaders in India.