Can you imagine what it would be like to run your company's portfolio of owned and leased spaces without real estate management software? If not, read on, and we'll show you what life is like in a non-automated corporate real estate department.
Calendaring Your Portfolio
The first thing you will have to do every day is check to see what is coming up. Hopefully, you hand entered every important date for your corporate real estate portfolio into your calendar. If you did, those dates will have to compete with everything else there for your attention, making it likely that you will miss one and eventually end up not having cash-on-hand for a CAM increase or, even worse, missing a notification date for an option to renew. If the dates aren't in your calendar, it's even worse. You'll have to go back to your leases or your abstracts and read through every one of them to find important milestones and targets that you need to hit. After all, you can't count on your real estate management software to do it, since you don't have it.
Managing Portfolio Documents
While you're searching for lease documents, you could run into an additional difficulty -- finding them. Real estate management software usually has its own document filing systems built in, keeping every piece of paper handy when you enter a space or property's record. Without one, you'll have to remember where you put every scanned document on your computer or file server. If you're still working off of paper, you'll end up paging through files. Good luck!
Benchmarking Your Portfolio
If you think day to day operations are tough, wait until you need to do some portfolio benchmarking to see which spaces have the highest occupancy costs or lowest productivity. To do this, you'll need to find your accounting reports that break down each space's expenses. You can then reconcile them against your leases to calculate their costs per square foot. Operating reports can give you the information to calculate sales per square foot or square footage per employee.
That process will give you a benchmark for one property. To make it useful, though, you will really want to benchmark every property together. This means repeating the process for every site in your company's portfolio. Once you've done that, you will have to carefully copy and paste the data into a single spreadsheet. You can then sort it or otherwise analyze it to get the data you need to make a good decision.
Of course, if you want to benchmark every aspect of every property and you don't have real estate management software, you're going to have to enter a lot of data into your spreadsheet. Here's a tip to help you get the numbers right -- enter each item twice and have Excel compare the two entries. If they're both the same, you either got them right or made the exact same typo twice. If they aren't, you have a typo somewhere. By the way, this takes a while.
A Solution
Does this process seem like a nightmare? If it does, there is an easy solution. Invest in real estate management software to automate these -- and many other -- tasks. If you'd like to learn more about our commercial lease administration software, REoptimizer®, sign up for a live demo below:
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