by Brianna Crandall — November 12, 2012—Workgroup members from OSCRE International, Ltd., the Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate, have announced the publication of the Investment Performance Reporting (IPR) Standard V1. The standard will ensure global consistency in data definitions when investment performance data for professionally managed real estate is submitted to multiple parties. The standard is expected to increase data accuracy and quality, ultimately leading to an increased ease of reporting to investors.
The OSCRE IPR specification will be used by investors, property managers and their benchmarking, index and analytics service providers to transfer fund, property, valuation and financial data, whether within one organization or across various organizations. The efficient transfer of data between and within these organizations is fundamental to the continued drive for accuracy and speed for the turnaround of performance reporting, notes OSCRE. Using the IPR specification benchmark, index and analytics service providers can use the input data to calculate various performance metrics (e.g. IRR and TWR) and report the results to the clients/investors at property, investment and fund level.
OSCRE reminds that when data needs to be transferred between the property manager, fund manager and valuer/appraiser, and where relevant to external performance measurement institutions such as the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries (NCREIF), the Investment Property Databank (IPD) or the European Association for Investors in Non-Listed Real Estate Vehicles (INREV), at every point of exchange the data needs to be converted or translated between the various property management systems and databases. This tends to be a slow, manual task, often prone to error and necessitating further reviews.
The use of an accepted standard like the OSCRE IPR is designed to reduce the time taken to transfer the data and enable results to be published earlier. It is estimated that the current manual processes can take as many as five working days, whereas use of an automated process based on the data standard would reduce this to the press of a button, says OSCRE. By using the standard, organizations can expect to see an improvement to the accuracy and reliability of the data involved.
OSCRE now welcomes organizations to adopt and implement this standard.
