REoptimizer^® Blog

If you have to manage more than one or two locations, your company needs full-fledged lease administration software. While Excel and Outlook might be adequate to track one or two locations, even small commercial real estate portfolios contain too many details and too many critical dates for you to be able to trust general purpose software. Furthermore, given the increasing stringency of audits, using the right software can help to keep your books in the right shape while also maximizing your portfolios efficiency. Here are five features to look for in your corporate real estate applications.

Typically, companies start looking for new commercial real estate space as little as nine months before their existing lease ends. Unfortunately, they're doing it wrong. To successfully find and negotiate a new space, the savviest tenants can spend two to three years planning for a move.

When you sit down to choose a commercial real estate broker to serve as your tenant representative, finding the right one can be a challenge. Typically, the right broker brings two things to the table -- a personality that meshes with yours and a comprehensive skill set. While you can gauge whether or not a broker is a good fit for you through a conversation over lunch, asking the right questions is key to assessing skills. Here are six good ones and some guidance on what to seek.

Just because an office lease is a binding document doesn't mean that you're stuck staying in a space that doesn't work for your business. While it's unwise to unilaterally break your lease and stop paying, most leases and landlords leave you opportunities to find creative solutions to real estate problems.

Even if your landlord and his team has completed thousands of commercial leases and you've only worked on a handful, you can walk away from the negotiating table with a great lease -- and a great deal. It doesn't take luck to win at the commercial lease negotiation game. What it does take is skill. Using a few crucial skills to execute a well-planned strategy is what sets pros apart from neophytes.

As the role of mobile devices in the commercial real estate workplace matures, many real estate professionals like you are finding that they are useful business tools almost more than they are useful real estate tools. While applications like CoStar Go, PowerOne Finance Pro Calculator and LoopNet are useful, the real power frequently comes from the same applications that are applicable outside of our industry as well. Here are the top five business applications that can help make your more productive at your desk and on the road.

Many industries have their own special language and ways of doing things and commercial real estate is no different. When you're a tenant looking at a proposed office lease, these industry quirks can add up to real costs. Here are five things that you should be looking carefully at your lease documents to find.

Once, even mid-sized companies had large corporate real estate departments that handled lease negotiation, site selection and property management. Today, many companies choose to run leaner and, instead, put responsibility for managing their commercial real estate on anyone from a COO, CFO or even, in some cases, the human resources department. If you're a part-time CRE manager, here are some terms that might not be familiar, but that you should know: