In the complex world of European real estate investment, Catella found itself trapped in a labyrinth of spreadsheets, struggling to transform vast amounts of operational and market data into actionable insights. Thousands of disconnected Excel files created version control nightmares, hindering collaboration and strategic decision-making across their federated organizational structure. They knew they needed a platform that could standardize data processes, enable quick data transformation, support investment opportunity analysis, and facilitate deployment of intelligent applications.
Enter Dataiku — the Universal AI Platform — which would become the central nervous system of Catella’s data analytics strategy. The team at Catella quickly recognized Dataiku’s potential as the complete system support for investment and asset management.
Dataiku: Catella’s Central Hub for Intelligence
Dataiku solved critical challenges that had long troubled Catella’s data processes. Where data transformation previously consumed up to five days, Dataiku reduced this to mere minutes. The team could now rapidly ingest and analyze data from sources like Salesforce, Snowflake, and other property management systems, creating analytic apps and standardized dashboards while maintaining the flexibility for individual teams to customize their insights.
Aside from data transformation, Catella uses Dataiku to predict future rent and sale prices of portfolio assets and potential new investments. Catella leverages Dataiku web apps to package and distribute intelligence to business users, enabling quick access to relevant data and providing a simple yet effective presentation layer for hands-on interaction.
Key Dataiku Use Cases
Dataiku is being used across two primary use cases:
1. An interactive web app in Dataiku to identify potential for growth in rental and residential sales. The team is focused on enhancing the real estate investment process to build out a bigger and more qualitative pipeline of investment opportunities and raise capital in a better way. The use case predicts future growth over the course of the next five years for residential projects in Catella’s core markets using an AI model that analyzes a broad range of data sources. The analysis increased the robustness of the decision-making process and enabled users to screen potential investment locations faster and more scientifically.
2. An asset manager web app to leverage more insights from core operational data surrounding these properties and assets. This provides a tool to asset managers with user-friendly functionalities including data filtering and sharing in order to help them collect and analyze property information. The dashboards, analytics, visualizations, and reports have increased the reliability of the data used by different teams and the app is in the process of being rolled out across the entire company.
The team also works on several ML projects tailored to individual markets, focusing on current topics such as climate resilience, which is becoming increasingly important for investment decision-making.
Time Saved, Stack Efficiency Realized
Catella realized “instant ROI” in the first quarter of buying Dataiku, which led to the removal of external consulting spend as the team started to do more in house.
AI has to be an everyday occurrence, continuously there in the backbone. But it can’t be facilitated without tools, there has to be somewhere to go and, for us, Dataiku is the place to go.
-Martin Johanson, CIO, Catella
Beyond mere cost reduction, Dataiku enabled a fundamental shift in how the organization approached data:
- Enhanced governance, moving from thousands of spreadsheets with no data quality or version control into an end-to-end platform with robust guardrails and built-in data quality (i.e., to pinpoint where asset management data is missing by location)
- Standardized, group-wide dashboards and a sandbox where each business user can work how they are most comfortable
- Existing synergy with Snowflake for global tech stack alignment
“At the end of the day, a tool is just a tool,” Johanson reflected. “It comes down to the people and the platform to make it come to life.” For Catella, Dataiku represents more than software — it is a strategic partner in building a truly data-driven culture.
Looking Ahead
Looking to the future, Catella sees Dataiku as key to their ambitious goals: enhancing investment decision-making, enabling profitable growth through automation and improved scalability, and creating innovative experiences for customers and employees. In an industry where intelligence is the primary currency, Catella has found its competitive edge — not through isolated spreadsheets, but through a unified, intelligent platform that transforms data into a strategic opportunity.
