REoptimizer^® Blog

Managing your company's real estate portfolio isn't a task to be taken lightly, and it isn't one to do on your own. Not only is your portfolio completely dependent on a series of very small details, but it is also extremely fault intolerant. After all, missing a single date could cost your company thousands (or millions) of dollars. With this in mind, commercial real estate software is a crucial part of your overall enterprise software package. Here are the top five reasons that large and small businesses add packages like REoptimizer® to their technology platforms:

Corporate real estate strategy doesn't move in lease cycles anymore. While many of the most important decisions in running a corporate portfolio occur when renewals come up, operating buildings requires real-time information. This kind of data can help companies decide which locations to open, which to close and where to make capital expenditures.

In addition to lease rollovers, anniversary dates are also important milestones in corporate real estate strategy. The arrival of CAM reconciliations from landlords or the completion of a yearly budget period for owned space allows corporate real estate directors to analyze property performance to determine if there are any issues that need to be dealt with. However, waiting for an entire year to analyze a building and its performance could lead to lags in decision-making. Here are some case studies of buildings where real-time reporting saved money, and some cases where a lagging corporate real estate strategy resulted in suffocating losses:

There are two basic ways to reduce your occupancy cost. One way is to simply make do with less expensive space. Another is to rejigger your office layout and improve your space density. Either giving up unused space or adding new users without increasing your square footage can give you the best of both worlds.

Office density is the number of people you can squeeze into a given area. For instance, an 5,000 square foot office that has 20 people in it has half the density of one with 40 people. Reductions from 250 square feet per employee to 125 might require a major revision of office layout and design but are being achieved by small and large companies alike.
 

A commercial real estate negotiation is supply and demand in action. When a landlord has open space and multiple tenants competing for it, the price goes up. However, if you have multiple landlords competing for your business, your position improves. While a bidding war for your tenancy might not exactly be an auction, you can still create a bidding war that results in lower lease rates and better concessions. Here's how:

The choice between owning and renting commercial real estate might seem to be a daunting one. However, it comes down to three factors -- what it costs up front, what it costs over time and the suitability of the space and the occupancy structure over the long term.

Choosing the right site is about much more than getting a great space for $32 a foot instead of $33. It's also about choosing a location that fits well with your broader corporate real estate strategy and with your company's marketing, product and financial strategies. All of these concerns make site selection a much more important and sensitive process than it might seem.