Modernizing real estate portfolio analytics with Microsoft Fabric 

Client background

The company is a large, privately held real estate services firm with a national footprint across investment management, development and property operations. Within its industrial real estate portfolio, the Baker Tilly team supported the design and delivery of property portfolio analysis, enabling centralized data collection, validation and analytics to support investor reporting, portfolio insights and data-driven investment storytelling, while establishing a scalable data foundation to be leveraged across other areas of the business moving forward.

The business challenge

The company faced significant challenges due to manual data collection processes and industrial portfolio data dispersed across multiple systems, spreadsheets and sources. To refresh reporting required substantial time and effort, limiting the ability to deliver timely, consistent and investor-ready insights. In addition, business users did not always have clear access to underlying systems or a strong understanding of how data was structured, making it difficult to validate results or confidently answer investment questions. 

As institutional real estate investors increasingly expect real-time transparency, sophisticated analytics and compelling data-driven narratives, these limitations created risk and inefficiency. This investor demand drove the need for a centralized property portfolio dashboard and a standardized data foundation to improve data quality, usability and scalability across the organization. 

Strategy and solution

The firm began its journey with Baker Tilly by engaging our team to discuss overall data strategy, recognizing the importance of establishing a strong, scalable data foundation to support long-term analytics and reporting needs. Together, we aligned on Microsoft Fabric and Power BI as core platforms to deliver immediate value while laying the framework for broader adoption across the organization. 

Baker Tilly collaborated with the company to modernize its industrial portfolio reporting by designing and delivering a Property Portfolio Dashboard built in Power BI and supported by a centralized data warehouse in Microsoft Fabric. Our services included creating an application for property data collection and validation, data warehouse implementation and dashboard design and development to replace manual, spreadsheet-driven reporting with a standardized, scalable data foundation.  

The unified data model established consistent definitions, calculations and relationships across portfolio data, improving usability, trust and accessibility for business users. The solution was intentionally designed to serve as a reusable Fabric-based data foundation that can be extended across additional asset classes and business functions as the firm’s analytics capabilities continue to evolve. Together, these capabilities translated into the following business outcomes: 

• Improved highly manual reporting processes and enabled business users to view updated portfolio data in a single Power BI dashboard 
• Centralized 60+ industrial portfolio data points within a single Fabric semantic model, improving consistency and data confidence 
• Unified the collection of property attributes into a single web-based application 
• Improved business-user access to, and understanding of, data through standardized metrics and intuitive Power BI analytics 
• Established a scalable Microsoft Fabric data foundation designed for reuse across the enterprise