Posted by Heidi Schwartz
Honest Buildings, a management platform for commercial real estate (CRE) projects, has unveiled Honest Buildings for Owners, an online software for building owners and project managers to track and analyze procurement processes throughout their entire portfolios. Honest Buildings for Owners streamlines day-to-day project management activities and will integrate with Honest Buildings’ existing online real estate marketplace.
“Honest Buildings for Owners is the result of years of hands-on collaboration with the CRE industry’s most progressive owners seeking to save time and money on building projects through new technological efficiencies,” said Riggs Kubiak, CEO and co-founder of Honest Buildings. “By aggregating entire portfolios of buildings and projects in one vendor management system, this platform empowers owners and project managers to make informed, contextualized decisions when bidding a project of any size.”
Honest Buildings for Owners’ cloud-based, Software as a Service (SaaS) suite delivers a simplified set of tools that organize a user’s entire expanse of building and construction data, providing clear insights on project bids, associated costs, vendor selection, and internal efficiency.
Using the software platform, owners can track critical project marks including bids received, key dates, and insight into project manager workload. Honest Buildings for Owners’ centralized dashboard replaces thee-mail and spreadsheet-based processes owners often use, enabling them to identify inconsistencies and inefficiencies in project bidding and spending throughout a portfolio.
Honest Buildings for Owners also introduces new bid rooms, which serve as hubs for collaboration with vendors and internal stakeholders. These hubs set out to eliminate the need for excessive e-mail or phone communications with individual vendors.
Early adopters of Honest Buildings’ latest technology include some New York area owners and operators, including Kushner Companies, Benchmark Real Estate Group, WeWork, Madison Realty Capital, Cayuga Capital, and Megalith Capital Management. Each company has fully loaded its portfolio of buildings and projects onto the central dashboard, enabling access to the software’s complete set of management tools and market data.
“For too long, the procurement process has been dominated by pen, paper, spreadsheets, and e-mail. With critical information so scattered and disorganized, there was no way for owners to make sense of the vast amounts of potentially useful data and make sure that there was true accountability and integrity in bidding,” said Jared Kushner, CEO and principal owner of Kushner Companies. “Honest Buildings for Owners is an intuitive solution that brings order to the chaos. Whether it’s taking a look at portfolio-wide figures to spot trends or drilling down to specific assets or vendors, we now have data at our fingertips that we can harness in order to realize significant cost savings through smarter procurement decisions and enhanced workflow management.”
Based on a subscription service, Honest Buildings for Owners is fully integrated with the company’s existing real estate marketplace, which provides a simple web-enabled platform for building professionals to create free, online portfolios of their work. From there, the marketplace is able to run custom searches on behalf of real estate decision makers and produce detailed evaluations of experienced and relevant specialists, each accompanied by service ratings, project history, and bidding trends. The combination of Honest Buildings for Owners and the marketplace creates an efficient, enhanced process for building owners and occupiers to compare, vet, and select the most relevant building professionals for the specific requirements of their projects.