For many corporate organisations, managing properties is not a primary focus. Instead, it’s a necessity activity, albeit an often under-resourced one. A retailer operating a chain of high street shops, for example, must spend time and money finding and managing each of its stores, even though its business is driven primarily by its need to generate sales. And in the business-to-business world, the story is similar: A large technology company might be focused on developing new software, but it still must manage the buildings that house its employees.

While organisations need to concentrate on supporting their core competencies, the laser focus that usually defines successful companies can lead some to pay less attention to managing the very properties that enable them to do business. With real estate often representing a company’s second-largest expense after personnel, not ensuring their effective management can result in a significant negative impact on the bottom line.

Unfortunately, because real estate is not the organisation’s primary business, the real estate manager is not always viewed as important or as strategic as other roles, and thus may not be given the necessary tools to effectively perform his or her job. Because of this, organisations can suffer from missed opportunities, inefficient work processes and excessive costs.

Other companies, however, pay a great deal of attention to real estate management. Those that do so are finding their investments in improved management are being rewarded with increased asset utilisation, lower costs, time-saving process automation and greater visibility into property data.

How do you increase your real estate management capabilities? One recommendation is to adopt a single, cohesive system that will help you track and manage activities throughout the complete real estate management cycle. The key areas for which you will need support include:

• Site acquisition. Finding the right property in the right location is vital to your business’s success. Give your transaction managers the tools they need with software that can help them track and import key information about prospective properties, such as demographic and transportation details, and enable them to analyse the data to make the best recommendation for a new site.
• Construction management/site development. Once the new property has been leased or bought, it’s critical to complete the build out as quickly as possible in order to meet your business objectives. With an integrated solution, information gathered during the site acquisition phase can be used to kick off construction management workflows. Furthermore, since many costs are incurred during this phase, by integrating your corporate real estate management solution with your accounting software, you can streamline purchasing activities, helping to further speed the construction process. In a retail environment, for example, careful planning and timely execution can lead to early store openings and increased revenue.
• Lease management. Leases are often complicated, so keeping careful track of important lease terms can help keep you from incurring unnecessary costs. Ideally, your corporate real estate system should allow you to abstract lease information and store it for automatic reconciliation against invoices. This will reduce the chances of costly errors occurring and further streamline administrative activities.
• Sublease management. If your organisation acts as a landlord as well, having the right tools to manage your leases will help you maximise revenues and increase occupancy rates.
• Facility management. Proactive preventative maintenance can help reduce costs in the long run. And by using automated workflow tools to streamline work order processing and manage maintenance time more efficiently, you can drive costs down.

Property management shouldn’t have to be a burden. With the right tools and assistance, you can more effectively manage your critical real estate assets to help further your organisation’s objectives, lower costs and contribute to your bottom line.