Property management without commercial real estate software is much like visiting a sausage factory or watching Congress make laws. You could do it, but you probably wouldn't want to. While each commercial real estate package offers different features, the feature set offered by REoptimizer is a good benchmark of how adding software can help your company with project management.
Managing Critical Dates
You might use Outlook or Google Calendar to manage your appointments and your dates, but they have a fundamental problem when it comes to handling your real estate portfolio's calendar. If you're going to use them to keep your calendar straight, you'll have to double enter the data, and that creates a risk of entering erroneous information or of missing a date completely.
With commercial real estate software handling your dates, the data comes off of the lease abstract data that you enter up front. Given that a data entry error would end up being reflected throughout the software, you are much more likely to catch it before it causes an expensive problem. You also get an integrated calendar that lets you visualize everything that is happening with your company's real estate portfolio -- for weeks, months or years to come.
Analyzing Occupancy Costs
You can calculate all of your occupancy costs by hand or using a spreadsheet, but that practice is time consuming. Commercial real estate software aggregates all of your property information and uses it to create reports that you can use to analyze each property on its own merits or to compare them to each other. This way, you can quickly see which properties are performing well and which could potentially be drains on your company's bottom line.
Mapping and Visualization Tools
It's hard to tell where your company has gaps in its portfolio by looking at a list of locations. Commercial real estate software like REoptimizer that has a mapping function helps you visualize your portfolio so that you can quickly see where you need to add locations and where you might be over concentrated. Mapping tools also help you see when you have locations that are less central than they should be, especially as communities grow and change shapes.
Along with mapping capabilities, commercial real estate software has other visualization tools. The ability to create sorted and ranked lists lets you quickly see which sites are on the top of a given category of analysis and which aren't. Graphing tools help you visually compare different costs and pieces of operating data so that you can more quickly decide where to drill down.
Market Intelligence
While many commercial real estate software solutions let you benchmark the properties in your portfolio against each other, REoptimizer also lets you benchmark against the market. Loading data from other properties into your commercial real estate software lets you see what you are paying relative to your competitors. With this information, you can decide whether to stay, renegotiate or leave as your leases roll over.
Having competitive data also takes your property mapping to a new level. Instead of just looking for spaces that work for your company, you can tell whether or not the spaces that you occupy are the best available and, if not, make changes as appropriate.
Commercial real estate software offers greater accuracy. It also gives you the opportunity to more quickly benchmark your portfolio so that you can make better business decisions. Some even give you the information to look outside so that you can design a comprehensive strategy, right at your desktop.
Here are a few other articles we think you will like:
Subscribe to our blog for more CRE tips!!
