June 23, 2023
Tech adoption is a challenge for CRE, but the payoff is well worth it. Mark Meehan, Office Sector Director at Nuveen, encouraged his team to adopt Prophia as a cloud solution to manage their critical portfolio data and today the firm is announcing continued expansion onto the platform.
As one of the leading investment managers in the country, Nuveen, a TIAA Company, is always finding the most innovative path forward when it comes to investment and portfolio management. So when the firm announced early in 2023 that it would be expanding digitization efforts into their Life Science and Office assets, it wasn’t particularly surprising to the data experts at their AI provider, Prophia.
Tech adoption in CRE is a challenge, even today as we approach the second half of 2023. Obstacles such as data access, team silos, and source data uniformity make it challenging for CRE teams to digitize mission-critical documents and data scientists to develop tools with the contextual knowledge and data-processing power capable of supporting CRE workloads.
But all of that is slowly changing. Firms are starting to wake up to the business intelligence and competitive advantages of portfolio digitization and data management, and Prophia is actively continuing to develop its machine learning model to support the ever-changing needs of those professionals.
This was the case for Mark Meehan at Nuveen who was first exposed to Prophia’s processing power while managing a number of assets within the office sector. He was struck by Prophia’s ease of use and chose to roll out the technology across the balance of his assets. This kicked off adoption among other team members and eventually led to this 10M square foot expansion, digitizing their Life Science and Office portfolio.
“We rolled out Prophia in staggered stages, but we wanted to have a comprehensive view of all lease data points and a platform that facilitates easy navigation and reporting,” Mark Meehan, director of office sector for Nuveen Real Estate, says in prepared comments. “Prophia excels in managing the complex data within contractual documents throughout the entire lease lifespan. While deal workflow is essential, we recognized Prophia’s unique qualification to handle data management beyond lease execution.”
This expansion not only speaks to Mark’s forethought to discover an automated solution to manage the data in his assets, it also speaks to the partnership model Prophia adopts with every client.
The Prophia-Nuveen partnership started in 2022 with a pilot project and acquisition of the Millennium Tower in Seattle. The multi-use building was a unique challenge for Prophia because it featured nearly 20 stories and 201,000 square feet of rentable mixed-use space. Almost every lease was complex with highly specific tenant terms and conditions but Prophia successfully extracted and onboarded the key terms contained within those commercial contracts.
Since then, Nuveen has been able to drastically improve their data accuracy and business intelligence speed, making it possible for leasing and asset management professionals, like Mark Meehan, to access the insight they need to successfully manage the performance of their assets.
With the expansion into their Life Science and Office portfolio, Nuveen is taking actionable steps towards safeguarding their assets against market volatility (Office sector) while investing in the sectors that are trending upward (Life Science). As we enter the second and third quarters of 2023, Nuveen is sure to have better visibility into their portfolio performance with Prophia as their data partner.
See the entire coverage in GlobeSt, penned by Erik Sherman, and CRE MarketBeat, written by Steven Griffin. Or read about us in the recent CRETECH newsletter.