Data Crunching to Build Efficiencies

“We’re elevating our game. We’re assessing ourselves to understand where we can improve so that we can act upon it, in order to impact the resident experience positively.”

Aman Bhalla believes operations analytics and data can help Avenue Living Communities perform better and more efficiently, while at the same time enhancing the experience for the company’s residents.

As part of his new role as Senior Vice President, Investment Management, Avenue Living Asset Management, Bhalla recently launched an initiative to develop well-informed decisions for asset strategy through building better data infrastructure and reporting.

“It’s more of a proactive play versus a reactive play.”

Avenue Living Asset Management has aggressively and ambitiously built a portfolio of more than 8,500 residential rental units across Western Canada in just 13 years.

The Calgary-based company’s journey began in 2006 with the purchase of 24 rental units in Brooks, Alberta for $3 Million.

Previously, Bhalla was Regional Vice President for Southern Alberta Operations, where he also took on the role of developing and overseeing the company’s quality assurance program.

“In our QA program, our team is collecting quality information across all of our residential operations,” says Bhalla. “We’re taking that information and driving trends and behaviours; understanding historical information to predict where the future of us will be.

“We use a software for the inspection, and to house the data which is called iAuditor. We have created templates that are custom to Avenue’s operations, and we are leveraging the use of that data. It gives us some key pieces of information.”

Those include the areas where the company can improve the most. It measures building assessments, a variety of key performance indicators, and completion of day-to-day tasks. It measures for true real-time performance in the field, as well as staff engagement and how the company presents itself in terms of its branding and overall image.

The gathering of information is done through roving inspections and it is housed in the iAuditor tool. It’s basically an inspection platform.

The web-based approach allows Avenue Living to set some benchmarks for how an asset is performing. Through its data gathering, it can easily and quickly determine if a certain portfolio is meeting that benchmark for performance. If it’s not, the company can tackle what needs to be done in a timely way to bring that portfolio up to benchmark standards.

The goal, of course, is ultimately to improve the quality of the experience for the people who reside in Avenue Living’s properties, as well as the team members who operate them.