As the field of commercial lease administration software programs continues to expand, choosing the right one for your company gets more and more challenging. There are a few features, though, that are non-negotiable. Programs that support these four crucial functions will give you the basic functionality that you need to effectively manage your real estate portfolio.

Critical Date Management

Lease administration software should be designed to help you track the many different dates and milestones that come up as a part of managing a corporate portfolio. Between anniversary, expiration and option dates, your calendar can rapidly fill with important events that you cannot afford to miss. The best programs don't just track the dates, though. They also display them in a color-coded format so that you can see what is happening and when with a simple glance.

Cost Drill-Down Functionality

In many parts of the country, operating costs can be equal to 50 percent or more of what a property's rents are. As such, the ability to drill down deeply into occupancy costs for each property in a portfolio allows you to see where your money is going. The best commercial lease administration software programs offer both tables and graphs, letting you see the raw data or get pictorial representations of it.

Portfolio Benchmarking

While your lease administration software should handle detailed information on each of your locations, it should also be able to help you compare among your portfolio. With portfolio-wide benchmarking that combines operating data from your business with real estate portfolio metrics, you can quickly see which sites are operating well and which aren't.

Armed with that information, you can make better decisions about which sites to shrink and which to grow and which to renew and which to shut down. Benchmarking with multiple metrics can also help you identify which sites are the most effective at using space, most productive or greenest (to name a few criteria) so that you can identify best practices and disseminate them throughout your network.

Market Data Comparisons

A limited number of lease administration packages are adding an additional dimension of information. Instead of only reporting on the spaces in your portfolio, they integrate market data to let you know how your sites are performing relative to their markets. While information about your sites lets you make decisions about which sites to retain and which to close, adding in market data adds an additional level of decision making ability -- the chance to decide whether to stay or go in each of your locations.

REoptimizer® is one of the few commercial lease administration software programs that offers all four of these features in a single package.

Learn how REoptimizer® can help you!