The Visual Lease blog

At the time I was the Corporate Real Estate Director of a major multinational corporation with a headquarters in New York City. It was the mid 1990s, and the real estate market in midtown Manhattan was a bit soft. Senior management wanted to move out of New York to an owned (and relatively vacant) office building in suburban Connecticut.

What are some guiding principles for selecting and investing in software functionality in support of your facilities and real estate operations?

Perhaps one of the most daunting and complex responsibilities of the corporate real estate executive is the management  of lease escalation costs. These costs which represent expense pass- thrus from the landlord to the tenant can represent nearly half or more of the cost of tenant occupancy.

Many companies today use tenant representatives to handle various leasing actions such as leasehold relocations, renewals, expansions, and extensions.  Tenant representatives are commercial brokers who typically operate exclusively as tenant advocates, while collecting commissions from building owners. This may seem like a conflict of interest, but the industry has self-regulating practices to avoid most abusive behavior. 

Advances in technology and changes in user behavior are driving significant transformation in Integrated Workplace Management Systems (IWMS) software architecture and delivery..

As a Gartner analyst some years ago, I focused on the real estate/ facilities management software space. I had spent nearly thirty years in corporate real estate, and was perhaps the only analyst at Gartner who had a broad and varied background in corporate real estate. I wrote one of my first research notes, in April of 2003 on the corporate real estate and facilities management space when I identified the key components of what I later named IWMS.. a lot has changed since then.