HUD streamlines real estate reporting system
The Housing and Urban Development Department has streamlined its real estate management information tracking with a Web-based enterprise reporting application that eases demands on employees.
By Shruti Dat'
GCN Staff
The Housing and Urban Development Department has streamlined its real estate management information tracking with a Web-based enterprise reporting application that eases demands on employees.
'The purpose of the Real Estate Management System was to increase the quality of data for multifamily real estate data,' said Alan Strauss, HUD REMS program manager. 'There were a lot of stovepiped systems of multifamily property.'
REMS, built by Advanced Technology Systems of McLean, Va., gives 1,400 HUD users access to property information through an intranet, said Dean Fendley, the company's REMS development team leader.
The Web-based interface lets users track portfolios of insured and assisted properties. Each portfolio includes information about property location, size, ownership and financing. HUD employees can specify up to 50 criteria to generate customized reports.
Strauss said the system cost $3 million in fiscal 1998 and $4 million in fiscal 1999, and will cost $4.2 million this year.
Reports on demand
ColdFusion 4.0 from Allaire Corp. of Cambridge, Mass., incorporates a self-contained integrated development environment that lets REMS users develop ad hoc reports by pointing and clicking.
REMS taps into a Sybase Inc. database running on a Sun Microsystems Enterprise 3000 server.
Advanced Technology Systems recently integrated e.Reporting from Actuate Corp. of San Mateo, Calif., to make document delivery more flexible. Actuate's uniform resource locators and C application program interfaces let Advanced Technology Systems integrate e.Reporting into REMS, said Matt Campbell, an Actuate spokesman.
REMS previously used Microsoft Access, which required users to write results of database queries back into the browser in a Hypertext Markup Language table format.
With the e.Reporting feature, users access documents a page at a time, Fendley said.
'Some of our end users' requests return in excess of 5,000 pages of information,' Fendley said. 'Actuate's ability to serve these pages to the end user a page at a time, rather than as one large file, was essential to both the usability and performance of the system.'