MRI Software is thrilled to announce that we’ve won a Stevie® Award in the Large Computer Software Company of the Year category at the International Business Awards for the third year in a row! We’ve spent the last year and a half delivering on the promise of innovative solutions for the real estate industry, and we’re proud to have won this Stevie Award that acknowledges those innovations.

An innovation-driven approach

In 2019, MRI Software introduced several new products designed to further enable clients to transform the way their communities live, work, and play with an open and connected ecosystem of software solutions. One such product was MRI Application Gateway, a consumer-friendly homepage that allows users to access all of their MRI and third-party applications through one point of entry.

MRI also introduced a comprehensive payment solution that supports online and check payments for residential properties. Since the introduction of this product, MRI clients have been able to utilize its dashboard that tracks payment trends, alerts, and notifications for complete visibility into all transactions. MRI’s payments solution has served as an intuitive addition to the platform with the potential to expand into global markets in the coming years.

Delivering for our clients in times of crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged companies across the globe in ways they never thought possible. As North American companies were starting to see impacts to their business, MRI developed new features for our software solutions to help clients rise to the many challenges. Driven by a belief that leveraging technology was one of the best options property owners and managers could take to ensure business continuity while observing social restrictions, MRI introduced tools to help multifamily and commercial landlords account for deferred rent payments, outbound call routing capabilities to assist property leasing agents working remotely, and new analytics dashboards to give clients deeper insights into risk.

In addition to these product offerings, MRI also formed and mobilized a Market Insights team to monitor key indicators of health in the multifamily, affordable, and public housing industry. Every month since May, the Market Insights team has released data on how these industries compare to one another in terms of move-in rates, new application rates, and lease term statistics. These trends help to paint a picture of how the three housing sectors are faring amid a volatile environment. The report covering data through August 2020 is available here.

Market expansion and growth

In addition to all of this, MRI has been greatly expanding into underserved markets and building upon our own product offering to better serve people in these markets. In the past year alone, MRI has made several acquisitions to boost our offerings for the social housing industry on a global scale, extending the reach of our solutions in the UK and Australia. MRI has also taken on a greater role in the real estate occupier space, broadening our solutions around lease management, lease accounting, space management and more.

At MRI Software, the past several years have seen a team of highly talented professionals execute on a mission of strategic growth and innovation, and this award is only one of the latest indications that this approach is working. Recently, MRI Software’s growth was recognized on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies, and our success in expanding the reach of MRI’s product offerings was acknowledged with a Stevie Award win in the APAC region. MRI Software is proud to have received all these honors, but in terms of innovation, expansion, and growth, the best is yet to come.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created uncertainty in nearly every aspect of our lives. But, for those managing real estate, your CAFM (computer aided facility management) software can help provide some clarity. Now more than ever, it’s imperative that your company has accurate, real-time information about costs, space requirements, remote workers, and asset management.

Think about costs – property and facilities management are an organization’s second-biggest expenditure after its people. During times of flux, it’s essential to have a deep understanding of what these costs are. Likewise, whether expanding or contracting in space and/or personnel, you need to know exactly what space is available and needed. You should also know the location of your assets, whether these are assigned to a person or not, and be able to quickly run an inventory report.

To help you tackle the immediate impacts of the pandemic and to plan further ahead, here are 15 key questions you should be asking:

1. If 40% of our employees are remote working for an extended period, how does that impact our real estate costs?
2. How will our portfolio look when our employees return?
3. Are we able to temporarily shut down some of our facilities to reduce costs?
4. What is our company’s standard RSF (Rentable Square Footage)/person?
5. What is our company’s RSF/capacity?
6. If we have to shed space now, where can we increase occupancy in the future?
7. What floors can we shut down to reduce costs?
8. Where are the opportunities for restacks?
9. What spaces can be doubled up?
10. What spaces can be used as workrooms?
11. Is the shift to remote working reducing the need for work, meeting, cafeteria, amenity and other support spaces?
12. Are we utilizing or considering flexible workspaces?
13. Where are our assets located?
14. Are remote workers taking their office and mobile devices home?
15. What assets are employees responsible for?

Your CAFM solution can help you answer these. The data-driven metrics generated provide you with a deeper understanding of your portfolio utilization, vacancy, occupancy, department allocations, asset management, and personnel management – and should allow you to report to senior leadership in minutes, not days.

Relational databases, such as CAFM systems, can also bring disparate information together into one centralized location. Employee data, asset data, and space information can all be integrated together. When one set of data is updated, all of the associated data is updated too. For example, if an employee moves, all of their assets are moved with them automatically. The space allocation chargebacks are updated, as is occupancy/vacancy information, all without even having to log into the system. These efficiencies free up your facilities teams so they can focus on the most pressing issues and deadlines.

Additionally, Software as a Service, or SaaS, provides a centralized solution for managing your facilities without you having to take on backups, redundancies, or servers – the provider does that for you. And the best part is your employees can access the system anywhere, anytime, whether working remotely or in the office, or visiting another building off site.

Our clients have relied on our solutions to help them in times of uncertainty for more than 20 years. This might be the greatest challenge we’ve all faced in that period, but we are here to help and advise you in any way we can. If you feel there are aspects of your CAFM solution (or any of the applications you use) that can help you address essential processes at this time, or could inform your ongoing strategic approach, then please leverage our experience and expertise. Our team is ready to support you!

There is little doubt that COVID-19 and lockdown have had a profound and lasting impact on how commercial tenants are viewing their real estate. The devastating global economic impact of the crisis has left a huge proportion of corporate occupiers looking for ways to control and even slash costs – whether retailers struggling with shuttered stores and then a sobering lack of footfall, or enterprises with large parts of their office spaces, warehouses and other properties now painfully underutilised.

Furthermore, as lockdown is eased, other factors come into consideration: the requirement for social distancing, stringent hygiene measures and other restrictions; the urgent need to ensure employees, customers and visitors all feel safe and reassured as they go about their work in business settings. These now put space planning and space usage, well as occupant comfort and efficiency, at the heart of conversations about changes businesses are facing in light of the pandemic.

Space planning as a portfolio strategy

But it’s not all about COVID. The priorities and trends shaping strategies for real estate occupiers were already firmly on the radar of organisations, according to a report from MRI Software and independent research and consulting experts Verdantix. We spoke to top real estate and financial decision-makers at a broad range of organisations just at the time the global pandemic led to a wholesale shift to homeworking and impacted other ways in which businesses operate.

Interviews with leading executives from global enterprises such as ABB, Oracle and Vodafone showed that 72% identified space usage maximisation as a major trend affecting their property strategies, while 67% named occupant comfort and productivity. The respondents ranked their most important real estate priority as cost reduction (47%), with a further 37% identifying it as their second biggest priority – for a total of 84%. We would expect these numbers to now be even higher, given the stark reality of the coronavirus crisis and the havoc it has wreaked on households and businesses.

It is clear that COVID-19 has placed significant financial pressure on companies around the world and efforts to control spending will only intensify, leading many organisations to examine how they can use space – not only safely, but more efficiently going forward. Technology can play a critical role here, providing data that can be used to make informed and accurate decisions while space management can be optimised to create both a healthy and productive work environment.

Tooling up to deal with lease management as more than just a COVID priority

Lease flexibility to support operational agility was third on the list of top real estate priorities (19%), behind presence in prime locations (25%). Lease flexibility, however, will likely now be seen as a more urgent priority by many corporate occupiers as they take stock of their property portfolios and assess their options in the current climate – looking at where they are making a profit, where they are not and what they can do about it.

But again, the challenges go far beyond the impact of COVID. Many companies are still looking for help in navigating the challenges of lease management and ongoing compliance under new and tighter lease accounting changes (ASC 842 and IFRS 16), and the vast majority are looking for technology to help them, our research showed.

The in-depth interviews, which took in the 53 decision-makers’ views on proptech investments, looked at how they were using technology to deal with the requirements of the new lease accounting standards. Nearly two-thirds (63%) said software was an indispensable or effective means of speeding up compliance, while just 6% failed to see it as essential to meeting their reporting obligations.

In discussing how to maximise value from these investments, the respondents identified the leading critical or strong benefits of software for lease data management as:

• Data centralisations and scalability (70%)
• Enabling data-driven internal discussions (66%)
• Reduction in erroneous data/ ensuring data consistency (64%)
• Process control via data change tracking (59%)
• Speed of data capture via automated data extraction (53%)

Commenting on how real estate software provides value, the interviewees offered key insights:

• “The core benefit of software is that it massively helps co-ordinate the data reporting process, saving time and improving internal communication. If you have more accurate data, you make better decisions faster.” – Finance Director at an oil and gas firm
• “By putting everything in one place, the opportunity is to avoid complications when assembling data. You can compare location, as well as payment and escalation terms, all in the context of IFRS.” – Senior Finance Manager from a retailer
• “Software standardises and centralises data storage practices and gives us more time to double check accounting calculations. I can have peace of mind when reporting the results to key stakeholders outside the finance department.” – Chief Financial Officer of an electrical and electronic manufacturing firm

Pulling teams together moving forward

It is evident that real estate and finance teams the world over need to pull together to meet the many challenges they now face. Once again, the research showed this was the direction businesses across the Americas, APAC and EMEA have been taking. The interviews revealed that, going forward, 70% of the respondents saw their teams either collaborating more closely or merging together. As one head of real estate at a telecoms firm told the researchers: “We are working to make the property team more financially astute and the finance team more portfolio-aware.”

The more organisations enable cooperation across departments, geographies and teams – and provide technologies and approaches to support that – the better equipped to mitigate the impacts of the global financial crisis and put in place strategies for future success.

Download the report here to see the full results of our research.

Automating leasing and the lease abstraction process can enable commercial real estate firms to better manage data across the business and effectively integrate data across multiple systems. Today, as the commercial real estate industry navigates uncertain times due to the COVID-19 pandemic, one thing is certain: continuing to rely on what worked yesterday no longer works today. Modern commercial real estate organizations should be looking for new technologies that enable them to shape innovative strategies, work more efficiently, and stay competitive during and post pandemic.

Problems that can arise during manual workflows

In a recent webinar, industry experts from MRI Software, Leverton, and VTS discussed the challenges of manual processes and how technology can streamline leasing and lease abstraction.

Manual leasing processes have several obvious disadvantages including time-consuming work for the in-house lease admin team, the expenses associated with lawyers, and outsourced abstraction teams. However, there could also be profound effects on your organization that may not be immediately apparent in your every-day process, but can hold your organization back nonetheless.

1) Disconnect between the pipeline and in-place leases. When inputting new in-place leases, it may take some time to get your systems updated for a variety of reasons, and when the new lease is finally uploaded, information may have changed or might get entered incorrectly, which could lead to errors. The longer this process takes, the longer your reporting could be inaccurate.

2) Missed opportunities through lack of data-driven insights. There are many strategic advances that you can make by surfacing the data buried within documents and folders, and users often don’t even know it’s there. By missing these critical data sets, your organization can miss out on key opportunities.

3) Manual data migration. Oftentimes, double data entry can occur when manually uploading data into an ERP system, which then leads to errors and inconsistencies. Getting data out of a contract and into a document that is then added to an ERP can lead to discrepancies that affect revenue. With that, there’s also limited or no data analysis in an ERP system, or aggregation with other data sources.

Using technology to automate leasing processes for commercial organizations

Automating your leasing processes with technology from VTS, a leasing and asset management platform that focuses on workflows and functionality, can make reporting easier and more trustworthy. With so many stakeholders handling the lease data at the center of your business, the data is at risk of becoming disparate and unreliable. Do you trust that the data in your reports is correct? Do you trust that it’s been verified? Do you have data coming from the source system? Technology that integrates with an integrated ecosystem can pull from one source of data, providing you and your stakeholders with trustworthy reports.

Additionally, automating your lease abstraction with MRI Lease Intelligence, an AI tool powered by Leverton, An MRI Company, can establish good data governance within your organization. Automating lease abstraction cuts out the manual effort of pulling data from leases and manually uploading them into target system. Instead, it pulls specific data sets, including those that a manual lookover might not have found, into one central source for all of your lease data.

Using automated leasing solutions can help ensure the accuracy of your data and eliminate manual, error-prone data aggregation and entry. They also give users the ability to make more informed, data-driven decisions by utilizing source data rather than conjecture or stale information. With these benefits, commercial owners and operators can utilize automated lease tools to bolster their businesses in uncertain times and gain a competitive edge, even in challenging circumstances. Learn more about how automating your lease processes can prepare you for the future in this webinar.

This article was written by Philip Lehrman, MRI Software.

Every business has been affected in some way by the COVID-19 crisis. Successful businesses will see this as an opportunity to re-imagine their workplace and adapt to changing times. Space management tools are essential when it comes to managing costs during normal business cycles, but it’s even more vital in times of change like we’re seeing now.

Space management tracks people, places and things. Combining floor plans with data makes space management systems extremely powerful, consolidating disparate information into one system. Department, personnel, and asset information can work together with your CAD drawings to create powerful color-coded plans and reports which will inform your business decisions going forward, saving your company valuable time and expense.

5 questions to ask when reopening your facilities post-COVID-19

As companies start planning to reopen their facilities, there are several important factors to consider. Here’s how implementing a space management system can help:

• Will much of your workforce continue to work from home, or is your company reducing headcount? If so, will your company look to shed space to save money? A benchmarking report that returns the rentable square footage (RSF) per person, and RSF per capacity of each floor and building, can be used to calculate potential reductions in your real estate portfolio. If you decrease 10% of your in-office workforce, for example, you will be able to calculate the corresponding square footage should you decide to reduce it. Once these portfolio reductions have been determined, a space management system would be essential for planning restacks and portfolio consolidation. Moves can be scheduled in phases and set to future dates.
• Are employees going to return to work on a part-time basis? Some companies are bringing their employees back into the office part time, with the remainder of their work week spent at home. With a space management system, you can track which employees work Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and which work Tuesdays and Thursdays on alternate weeks.
• How are you implementing social distancing at your offices? We can help you put 1×1 grids on all of your CAD drawings so you can assign employees to desks at least six feet away from each other. Using move management tools, this information can be combined with alternate day office worker schedules and office evacuation plans to maximize social distancing while still meeting safety requirements. In addition, directional arrows can be placed on the floor plans to show foot traffic direction in common areas such as hallways and corridors, which can be easily printed and posted, as well as distributed electronically to your staff.
• What about employees that will still be working from home? For those employees, regional maps can be added that show where these employees are located, and those maps can be automatically color-coded by department or personnel type. Maps can be created by country, state, city, or whatever region you require. Assets can be assigned to remote employees, giving you the ability to track all mobile devices, laptops, or other company equipment that your personnel have brought home.
• Do you need flexible space planning? Spaces can be designated as free spacing, hoteling desks, and drop-down desks, setting those aside from permanently assigned spaces for occupancy planning.

Companies that already have space management tools in place have access to all of this information at their fingertips. It does not take much effort to adapt a tool for post-COVID-19 planning, and companies that don’t currently have a space management solution would be well served to implement one now. The MRI ProLease Space Management module can be implemented quickly, within weeks, providing you with a detailed understanding of your real estate portfolio to inform your business decisions going forward.

Learn more about MRI ProLease and request your free consultation here. We’ll help guide you through these turbulent times.