We’re implementing a property portfolio management integration between our external real estate system and Workday R1 2024. The challenge we’re facing is that Workday’s standard real estate data model doesn’t fully align with how our organization tracks commercial properties.
Our real estate system maintains detailed property portfolios with custom attributes like environmental certifications, tenant improvement allowances, lease escalation clauses, and property-specific operating expenses. When mapping this to Workday’s Real Estate API, we’re finding significant gaps. The API supports basic property information (address, square footage, lease terms) but lacks the flexibility for our custom attributes that drive financial reporting and space planning decisions.
We’ve considered using Workday’s custom fields, but we’re unsure if the API fully supports reading and writing custom field values for real estate objects. Has anyone successfully integrated complex property portfolio data with Workday? How did you handle the data model mismatch between external systems with rich property attributes and Workday’s more standardized real estate structure? Are there specific API design patterns or workarounds that preserve data fidelity during integration?
The environmental certification tracking is particularly tricky because it’s time-based (certifications expire and get renewed) and has multiple attributes (certification type, issuing body, expiration date, compliance status). This is a good candidate for a related custom object rather than trying to use custom fields on the main property record. Custom fields work for simple attributes but struggle with complex, multi-valued, or time-dependent data.
I want to mention that lease escalation clauses and tenant improvement allowances are actually financial calculations, not just static attributes. If you’re trying to sync these through the API, you need to think about whether you’re syncing the raw data (escalation percentages, TI dollar amounts) or the calculated results (projected rent increases, amortized TI expenses). This affects your integration design significantly - raw data needs to sync before Workday’s financial calculations run, while calculated results might need to sync after.
The data model mismatch you’re describing is common with external system integrations. Workday’s real estate module is designed around their standard data model, which works well for basic property management but struggles with industry-specific requirements. One approach is to maintain your rich property data in the external system as the system of record, and only sync the subset of data that Workday actually needs for financial and space planning purposes. Use the API for bidirectional sync of core attributes, but don’t try to force-fit everything into Workday’s model.
Custom fields in Workday can be accessed through the API, but you need to reference them by their exact field IDs, not just field names. The API documentation isn’t always clear about this. You’ll need to query the metadata service first to get the custom field IDs for your real estate objects, then include those IDs in your property update payloads. It’s more complex than standard fields but definitely doable.
You can use Workday’s extensibility framework to create custom objects that relate to the standard real estate objects. For example, create a custom ‘Property Operating Expenses’ object that has a relationship to the standard Location object. This gives you flexibility to model your specific data requirements while still integrating with Workday’s core real estate functionality. The API supports custom objects, though you’ll need to use the generic custom object endpoints rather than the real estate-specific ones.
That makes sense - keeping the external system as the source of truth for detailed property data. But we still need certain custom attributes in Workday because our financial reporting pulls property-specific operating expenses and tenant improvement costs directly from Workday. If those attributes aren’t available through the API, our reporting breaks. Is there a way to extend Workday’s real estate data model through configuration rather than trying to shoehorn everything into custom fields?