The real cost of manually extracting data from investment brochures

There’s a whole host of valuable information contained within investment brochures and tenancy schedules, which is why a sizeable portion of many surveyors and asset managers’ time is spent manually extracting it. 

That’s why we crunched the numbers and looked at the real cost of having skilled workers performing this highly repetitive task.

While administrators will often be tasked with the job of manual extraction, there are times when the data from investment brochures will be needed instantly and so it will fall to those who are using it to make business decisions, such as asset managers. Based on the average asset manager salary of £58,8471, their hourly rate breaks down to be £30.18. We’ve estimated that it takes 30 minutes to extract fields from a 20 page investment brochure, meaning it costs a staggering £15.09 per PDF in salary alone, and that’s not including other costs to employers such as NI and pension contributions. 

And that doesn’t account for the opportunity cost of not having the valuable extracted data available when it’s needed to fit in with the deal flow process. To produce comparables the data on multiple of similar local properties is required, so the time to extract the amount required for pricing and valuation decisions is far longer.

Our PDF Extractor takes seconds to extract the data on 70+ fields from investment brochures and tenancy schedules, and can extract data from 1,200 PDFs in the same time it would take a person to extract one. Having this data available at your fingertips when it’s needed will speed up the decision making process and mean you can move quickly when required.

In conclusion, it’s 80% more cost-effective and 1,200 times faster to use the PDF Extractor to unlock data from investment brochures. Staff morale may improve as a result, and the accuracy of extraction is consistent.