Case study
Watkin Jones is a long-established property company with a particular focus on build-to-rent, affordable housing, co-living, and student accommodation across the UK.
Watkin Jones is a long-established property company with a particular focus on build-to-rent, affordable housing, co-living, and student accommodation across the UK. With a heritage dating back to 1791, the organisation is a leading developer and manager of residential spaces, working with multiple third-party clients to provide modern living solutions.
Valto delivered a modern reporting solution built within Microsoft Fabric, designed to centralise all data and automate previously manual tasks. The engagement began with a deep-dive workshop to review every data source and requirement. From there, we assessed the best data ingestion methods and created pipelines to import information into a Fabric Lakehouse, forming the Bronze layer. Legacy SQL scripts were reverse-engineered and rewritten into PySpark to align with Fabric’s architecture, while semantic models and dynamic SQL scripts were developed to enable flexible, on-demand reporting. Robust role-level security was implemented to ensure each third-party client only accessed their own data. Power BI and SQL endpoints were deployed to provide accessible reporting interfaces. All new reports were validated against the original outputs to maintain accuracy, with user acceptance testing carried out prior to go-live.
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Watkin Jones modernises data management and delivers instant, accurate reporting through Microsoft Fabric.
Project Type: Fabric Sector: Real Estate
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Before the project began, Watkin Jones faced a number of inefficiencies stemming from how their data was processed and reported. The team managed client data spread across more than 20 different sources, with most reporting handled manually through Excel and tools like Power Query. Extracting data from third-party systems such as Yardy was repetitive and time-consuming, requiring custom parameters for each client. These disconnected systems made it difficult to provide dynamic, client-specific reports and created a reliance on slow, manual workflows that increased the risk of human error and delayed insights.
Watkin Jones now operates on a centralised, automated reporting platform that has significantly reduced the manual effort previously required. Reports that once involved multiple Excel exports and transformations are now generated instantly through secure, dynamic dashboards in Power BI.
Clients benefit from on-demand access to accurate property and financial data, while internal teams gain more time to focus on strategic initiatives rather than data wrangling. With all reporting consolidated in Microsoft Fabric, the business now has a scalable foundation for further enhancements. Looking ahead, Watkin Jones plans to expand the system’s capabilities with advanced reporting features, explore AI integration for deeper insights, and continue training internal teams to make the most of their new data environment.
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