When it comes to legacy PropTech, few companies have more of a legacy than MRI. Founded in 1971 as Management Reports Incorporated, the company was bought by Intuit in 2002 and then bought again, this time by a private equity firm, in 2009. They started out as accounting software but have grown into much more. They have expanded their product line to include an entire management platform for commercial and corporate real estate.
This week, MRI announced that they are adopting the long-standing OSCRE data standard. Data standards allow users, software companies and data providers to easily share data through consistent naming and formatting. Commercial real estate data is notorious for often having data inconsistencies (for example, rent per square foot is calculated on a yearly basis in New York versus a monthly basis in California).
This integration will ensure that data can be easily transported from one system to another. This bodes well for interoperability in the industry and demonstrates MRI’s commitment to its platform approach. The company has a partner portal that allows other adjacent companies to offer services to its user base. Every year, the company hosts a conference called Ascend where users can learn more about their partners, which happens to be taking place in Chicago right now. In 2018, I was able to attend one of these conferences, and it gave me a lot of hope for the tech ecosystem approach that MRI is taking.
Adopting an industry standard is another sign that MRI is committed to this strategy, which I think is good for the industry as a whole. It can be temptingly profitable for software companies to try to ‘lock in’ users and the data they provide. But in the long run, what MRI is doing may be a better play. If users feel trapped in a system, they will leave as soon as they are offered a change. What’s more, companies that don’t partner with other vendors are relying on their own product roadmaps to keep up with innovation in the industry as a whole, which they almost never do.
