Managing a portfolio of commercial real estate portfolio means tracking the critical dates for each lease and making sure that the people who need to know about them are reminded in enough time to make the key strategic decisions.
Expiring licenses, insurance policies and options require action. The accounting department may need to know the financial implications of lease renewals or rent and tenancy changes. Manually tracking them in a spreadsheet and sending reminders out by hand is a thing of the past. A centralized software tool that automates email reminders can manage these processes far more efficiently and with much less effort.
Your risk of overlooking a critical date will also decrease dramatically once you set up an automated system. People are fallible, and critical date management is too important to handle haphazardly, especially in a field like commercial real estate where a missed opportunity can cost millions of dollars.
If your critical date management solution integrates with your CRE, ERP, or financial software, so much the better. Depending on the size of your company and its portfolio, other desirable features may also include user-defined fields and integration with:
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Contract management
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Occupancy cost analysis
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FASB and SOX-compliant reporting
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Maintenance tracking
Critical date management software can also prompt employees to check back with insurance companies or permit issuers at predetermined times. All this information must be entered, of course, but afterwards the system will send out reminders as scheduled until instructed to stop.
To choose between the alternative solutions available, determine which dates your company needs to track. List the people the proposed solution needs to prompt, and with what data, if any. Also look at data sent to other software.
Seek input from stakeholders, modifying the needs analysis document as required. Time spent on this step may prevent you from purchasing software that will go unused because your users need a feature the application you bought doesn't offer. Once you know your organization's needs, you can select the features you want, decide how much you want to spend and select a solution that meets your criteria.
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