Success Story - Wüest Partner AG

The client

Wüest Partner was founded in 1985 and is an independent, owner-managed consulting company with over 220 employees at four locations in Switzerland and Germany. The focus is on the construction and real estate markets as well as the spatial and locational development. Wüest Partner supports clients at home and abroad with a wide range of services consisting of advice, evaluation, applications, data and publications in order to use its knowledge to create transparency and first-class decision-making bases and to pave new ways for the further development of the real estate industry.

The core of Wüest Partners’ own valuation services and Wüest Partners’ digital investment, portfolio and risk management strategy is “Wüest Dimensions”, a digital platform for the management and valuation of properties as well as market and portfolio analysis. The interactive web application contains real estate master data and real estate valuations using various financial and mathematical methods (e.g. DCF valuation, German earnings value determination according to ImmoWertV, hedonic pricing methods). On the other hand, the platform contains locational and market information, comparison with market rents and transaction prices, construction projects, real estate advertisements etc. It is used by numerous well-known and listed customers. The continuous further development of this state-of-the-art solution is therefore of great strategic importance for Wüest Partners.

“Our Wüest Dimensions platform contains extensive real estate information as well as market and benchmark data. However, these data sets have always been isolated sources of knowledge until now,” explains Dominik Eugster, Senior Consultant at Wüest Partner AG. “So far, our clients have only been able to use the added value that combining this data holds for risk and portfolio analyses to a limited extent. We have therefore used BI technology to develop a solution that allows both flexible analyses in various degrees of granularity and new insights into the market and our own portfolio.”

Qlik Sense acts as the technological basis for the new BI “Wüest Insights” module. The solution proved is particularly powerful due to its associative data indexing, which allows relationships between data to be examined across all sources. Qlik Sense also has an impressively high performance and intelligent functions for clearly visualising information.

The Swiss BI expert and Qlik Elite Solution Provider Informatec supported Wüest Partner with advice. The know-how of the IT service provider, particularly regarding infrastructure and performance, contributed decisively to ensuring that Wüest Partner was able to put the newly developed module into production within a few months.

Wüest Insights addresses the client segments investors, general and total contractors, financiers (analysis of the mortgage portfolio) as well as public and corporate real estate.

Three different modules with different scopes (Basic, Advanced and Professional) are available via web access. These each contain various interactive and interlinked worksheets with key figures and drill-down functions on different topics.

Interfaces to standard solutions for real estate management were also implemented in order to be able to incorporate current tenants, bills and budgets from management companies into the analyses on a daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly basis.

The basic module offers an overview of the overall portfolio and visualisations by geographic location and distribution in the real estate sector, among other things. There are also overviews of usage and property bills available.

The advanced module also maps the topics of market analysis and benchmarking in order to discover critical market developments in the real estate environment and potential for optimisation. Further typical applications include a comparison of portfolio and market parameters as well as benchmark comparisons with other institutional investors.

The professional version also offers applications for risk monitoring, risk/return optimisation, scenario analysis and automatic recommendations for action based on intelligent algorithms and standard strategies.

Qlik Sense was supplemented with the add-on NPrinting, an all-in-one tool which users can use to obtain their desired report at the touch of a button on the Wüest Insights web interface. “Clients use these in transactions as an automated application dossier, among other things”, explains Eugster. “When a client inspects a property that he wants to buy, a purchase evaluation is created. Wüest Insights then provides this as an automated report that shows the property data enriched with market data in comparison with the overall portfolio. The client thus saves an enormous amount of time and reduces operational risks, since there are less manual work steps involved and valid, clearly visualised information is generated as the basis for investment decisions.”