insightsoftware > Case Studies > How BH Management Achieved a Colossal 71% Increase in Apartment Unit Growth

How BH Management Achieved a Colossal 71% Increase in Apartment Unit Growth

Company Size

1,000+

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

Dundas BI

Tech Stack

Data Analytics
Business Intelligence

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Productivity Improvements
Revenue Growth

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Big Data Analytics
Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics

Applicable Functions

Business Operation
Sales & Marketing

Use Cases

Predictive Quality Analytics
Supply Chain Visibility

Services

Data Science Services
Software Design & Engineering Services

About The Customer

BH Management Services, LLC is one of the ten largest multi-family property management firms in the United States according to the National Multi-Housing Council, operating in nearly 300 communities with upwards of 90,000 apartment units that generate greater than $1 billion in annual gross revenue. What had once begun as a small start-up in 1993 has since thrived and is now comprised of four divisions (BH Equities, BH Management Services, BH Architecture & Design, and BH Construction Services), each of which contributes, and is essential to, the success of the whole. With a focus on the acquisition, improvement, and management of apartment communities, BH Management is able to provide living environments of exceptional quality across 19 states, while creating and maximizing asset value for each of its partners and clients, day in and day out.

The Challenge

In 2014, BH Management made the decision to proceed with a software vendor specializing in data analytics solutions specifically for the multi-family real estate industry. Their primary objective was to find and implement an analytics platform that would measure financial and operational performance, and more precisely, allow them to perform year-over-year net operating income comparisons. With these goals met, it then pressed to further customize the solution they’d implemented. BH Management maintained an abundance of disparate data that needed to be aggregated. To ensure this was done in a manner that was most meaningful to them, they needed additional software that could be modified to a great extent. They recognized the need for software with depth and versatility that could be tailored with the features they most coveted. BH Management had no other option but to begin looking for a new Business Intelligence (BI) platform. This time around, they knew they needed a BI platform that allowed for virtually limitless customization in creating data visualizations and would meet any design requirements they threw at it.

The Solution

One of the luxuries of being part of such a massive, multi-family, national company, is the abundance of resources BH Management had at their disposal. As a result, they were able to build an extraordinary Business Intelligence team, which could dedicate their time and energy into selecting the best BI platform possible. While coveting a BI platform that was flexible enough to meet the unique requirements of their company-wide deployment (data from all four divisions had to be aggregated and analyzed), the BH Management BI team was cognitive of the fact that to stay ahead of the curve and to remain competitive within the property management world (by virtue of having the best BI platform internally), they couldn’t allow themselves to become stagnant. As such, the team knew they needed a BI platform that ensured they’d never again need to compromise on their analytics. The tool they’d ultimately select needed to be easy to scale, customizable, and contain stunning visualizations. It also needed to be easy to govern; in addition to providing their 2200+ employees with varying levels of access to dashboards, they’d also make them available to their clients. After evaluating upwards of 15 different BI vendors, BH Management’s BI team met with Dundas, and as the only vendor that was able to deliver the exact solution they’d envisioned, the search was over.

Operational Impact

Using Dundas BI, BH Management was able to drill-down into their data to the lowest granularity, allowing them to allocate their Marketing dollars in the most effective ways possible.
Performance is paramount in the property management industry; as such, it’s vital BH Management had insight into which of their properties were performing well and which weren’t. Prior to Dundas BI, inferences and insights into which properties were high-performers was still possible, albeit difficult and onerous to distill. However, since implementing Dundas BI, BH Management’s been able to attribute a score to each individual property and recognize precisely the status of each (and have maintained the ability to track metrics with similar logic as before). They’re now able to tell which properties are struggling, which are successful, and in which direction each is trending.
Furthermore, Community Managers are able to access these same dashboards, empowering them to execute their own analysis and determine which actions they should take to improve. BH Management has built an outstanding experience for their property managers; one that provides them the ability to review their properties at varying granularities. They’re able to isolate each property and immediately identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as performance-to-budget, occupancy rates, effective and average rents, etc. Community Managers can now perform forecasts and comparisons with ease.

Quantitative Benefit

From 2014 to 2019, BH Management has increased the number of apartments they manage by 71%.
Part of this growth can be attributed to BH Fusion (created using Dundas BI) and the impact it’s had on helping them achieve complete transparency with their data; an attribute that’s helped them close innumerable multi-million-dollar deals.