Industry Sponsored Standards Online

Portfolio diversification is a method recommended by financial advisors of reducing the overall risk of an investment portfolio by holding a range of different types of assets. By diversifying, a portfolio’s value will not be entirely dependent upon the value of one asset. By not diversifying, you miss opportunities to capitalize on the value other asset types might provide.

Sustainable/Green efforts are extremely important for both our national and global health. However, like your retirement investment strategy, your business also needs a diversified strategy managing its assets; the first largest being the labor force; the second its owned and leased real estate portfolio, where the second has a direct impact on productivity levels of the first.

While the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System™ does consider the relationship between the built environment, its occupants, owners, operators and our planet, it’s only a portion of a much larger and diverse real property industry in dire need of streamlining strategic, operational and tactical business processes.

For quite some time we’ve had the capability for a person to send a text message (Data Originator) with attached files, photos, videos (Payload) from our mobile phone using one type of software to a coworker or friend (Data Recipient) using a PC running Outlook and/or an Apple computer with Eudora. This is a wonderful example of what needs to be developed for the Real Property and Facility Management world providing the ability to streamline how information is exchanged between stakeholders and their technology systems, particularly when you consider all of the software applications we dream of integrating together such as Strategic & Contingency Planning, Space, Move, Lease, Asset, Project, Haz-Mat Management with those of HR, Finance, Security and IT, not to mention outsourced service provider applications. Many bits and pieces of data from these different stakeholders are the same data points needed to be input into LEED and Energy Star templates as well as for the great benchmark reports developed by Shari Epstein at IFMA’s HQ and Lori Damon who oversees BOMA’s Experience Exchange Report. We need to develop a way to streamline the aggregation, compilation, analysis, reporting, presentation and most of all, the exchange of data between stakeholders and their software applications.

Some very significant work in this area has already been done by members of the Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate (OSCRE), a non-profit organization supported by IFMA, BOMA, CoreNet, CCIM, IREM, the Appraisal Institute, National Association of Realtors, as well as the major Public agencies, Private sector Corporate Real Estate End Users, leading Service Providers, Vendor and Software Developers in the U.S. and Canada.

What you need to know is that while members of OSCRE develop the standards to improve how their organization and related supply chain operate together, they’ve made these standards available to you and the rest of the industry at no charge. You can download them today at http://www.oscre.org

Quick Facts

Supporting member organizations of OSCRE Americas represent in excess of $2.1 trillion in real estate assets, 12.3 billion square feet of floor space and 1,370,500 association members.

Current available standards: