Paper is so yesterday.  Yes, it’s nice to thumb through a book, but when you’re reading a lease, it’s a bit boring.  Yet these leases are the lifeblood of your Corporate Real Estate department (CRE) and they can all be digitized along with your floor plans and lease amendments.

Digitizing your real estate department with all the working files therein is the first step in having a viable contingency plan. It is the only way these files can become portable. And by using encryption coding, they can even be secure.

Whatever system you use, we recommend that you do use a lease management system. All your pertinent documents, floor plans and site plans can be scanned into the system and readily available in a PDF file with a simple mouse click.

Even better, is a system that will accept any type of file that your operating system supports such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and PDF's, as they are a staple of corporate real estate.

Now that everyone has the ability to take quality photos and video from their smart phones, certain problem situations can quickly be photographed and uploaded into your property management tool.  From there, multiple team members can collaborate on the issue, or just document current conditions of the space.   It’s a great way to show “in the field” conditions – as they say, a picture is worth 1,000 words.

A truly robust system, like REoptimizer®, will allow you to incorporate unlimited photos and even video of each one of your sites. While having the ability to incorporate digital images may be nice to have, it soon becomes indispensable part of your business practices.

So creating a digital version of your real estate portfolio is the first, crucial step! A digital system can be on computer servers (even multiple servers at once) and can be readily backed up.

Lastly, and importantly, a digital system is portable.