Norwegian Real Estate developer finds flexibility and time savings with Bizview.

Large-scale real estate developer Nordr focuses on residential, commercial and mixed-use developments in metropolitan areas throughout Norway and Sweden. With headquarters in Oslo, Norway, the company has 18,800 individual housing units to its credit and has grown into one of the largest and most active developers on the Scandinavian peninsula.

The Challenge

Nordr has built a reputation upon sustainable development projects in communities that place a high value on green construction. They are amongst the first developers in the region to be recognized with Nordic Ecolabeling and have successfully developed the largest building research establishment’s environmental assessment method (BREEAM)-certified housing project. Given this commitment to green construction, developing 18,800 total units in 147 different housing projects is no easy feat.

The size, scope, and complexity of managing simultaneous development projects in two countries is demanding. Doing this while navigating the environmental and regulatory hurdles became a massively labor-intensive task for the 180-person staff. Kristoffer Danielsen, business controller at Nordr, recalls that his team was stuck in an endless cycle of manually assembling spreadsheets for their planning process–copying/pasting data from various sources and dumping it into one large, convoluted model.

Real estate planning requires juggling numerous variables and “what if” scenarios, as Danielsen explained,

“The challenge of the real estate industry is that there are so many variables. There are so many ways of calculating the value of the land and the value of the project that we are selling. We need to drill down to each specific area, to determine how much a unit can be sold for, depending on many internal and external variables. We need to figure out a precise calculation if we are first going to buy the land to sell it. Or buy to develop it ourselves to make a profitable project.”

Their old, manual planning process was time consuming and resulted in costly delays. In short, they were in desperate need of a new planning system that was fit to address the growing scale and complexity of their operation.

Building to Success With Bizview

Nordr made the decision to adopt Bizview as a planning solution in 2017. This gave them the ability to manage the variables that were once stalling project planning efforts. “With Bizview, we have all the information in one place. With one click, we can gather up all the planning and budgeting information from all our projects, into one report in an instant,” says Danielsen.

This ability to streamline the planning processes spread to other areas of the operation. As Danielsen described, Nordr’s business model operates with two distinct arms–one side of the company scouts out land and brings development projects forward when land has been purchased. The second side of the business buys and sells land only. Bizview enabled the company to consolidate both areas of the operation into one planning solution. Danielsen goes on to explain, “The key benefit for choosing Bizview is that we can access all the information in one go. We have all the resources, everything we need in one place. So, whenever we need a report for the whole company, we have it in an instant.”

Within the company, Bizview’s reach extended beyond finance and its financial planning and analysis (FP&A) duties over to marketing, where according to Danielsen. “Our marketing department now has access to updated budget data to support their forecasting process. Now they have a view of the past–how much we have sold–and how much we predict we are going to sell in the future. The marketing department used to manually perform this function quarterly, now they are able to reforecast weekly.”

Navigating Success

“Bizview is the key coordinator when it comes to planning our whole business… It is our source of information for the project organization.”

Nordr has greatly improved their planning process as a result of implementing Bizview:

• Consolidated data collection. “We are doing all of our calculations, for all of our projects, in one place.” 
• Increased planning accuracy. “We can make precise calculations in huge detail.” 
• Reduced reporting time. “Whenever we need a report for the whole company, we have it in an instant.” 
• Accelerated reforecasting schedule (from quarterly to weekly). 

For Nordr, the value of Bizview has been immense. By allowing the organization to manage the complexity in their business through the planning process, and to scale as new projects are initiated, Bizview has helped unlock new growth opportunities and profitability.