Increase Profit by Aligning Real Estate Operations and Objectives

4 min read
April 18, 2014
CoStar Real Estate Manager Blog

Increase Profit by Aligning Real Estate Operations and Objectives

As the expert in cloud-based real estate information management software, CoStar Real Estate Manager delivers better business intelligence to monitor business unit and service provider activities and strategy execution.

CoStar Market Data & Analytics has embedded industry best practices that support every aspect of the real estate lifecycle, enabling corporations to better manage the execution of set strategies to meet company goals.

How did you make your last real estate decision?

The way you manage your real estate directly affects whether you are successful at meeting your overall company objectives. The enormity of the capital you invest in real estate demands complete visibility into critical real estate information so you can make the best decisions in a timely manner. For example, do you know with certainty?

  • How many internal business unit clients you support?
  • How well you are able to successfully manage those client relationships?
  • How impactful would it be if you were able to easily perform business unit planning and share information from a single source that tracks activity progress?

If any of this information is not immediately available to you and all stakeholders, you’re at risk of managing an underperforming portfolio that is hindering your company from achieving its business objectives. CoStar Real Estate Manager can help you make positive decisions that are based on complete and accurate information that measures your entire portfolio. You’ll be able to eliminate information silos and increase collaboration between teams as you learn you can rely on a single source of trustworthy data that drives initiatives related to real estate strategy execution.

Make real estate a real advantage

Excel in these six, key focus areas to strategically align your real estate initiatives with company goals and significantly contribute to the overall success of your company.

  1. Conduct strategic planning

Building and managing strong relationships with internal business clients, and improving how service provider relationships are managed, is key to your ability to set and monitor real estate strategies that significantly contribute to the business goals of your company.

Organization-wide access to the complex real estate information needed to effectively monitor business unit and service provider strategy can provide visibility into critical information, enable quick decisions, establish location strategies based on performance, and track performance by locations, business units, regions or markets.

CoStar Real Estate Manager, including its powerful strategy and analytics module, provides customers with better business intelligence, efficiently consolidating market information and lease and location performance indicators into one central system. Users at all levels of the organization are empowered to make better and faster decisions that directly support company objectives.

  1. Meet company demand for real estate

To ensure your real estate assets keep up with expanding needs, you must: 1) anticipate space demand, 2) match space demand with existing supply, and 3) manage the acquisition process. A system-based approach to business unit planning can ensure timely delivery of new space, speed new space acquisition and meet time and budget goals.

CoStar Real Estate Manager provides an automated process for collecting and managing space requests that ensures company demands for real estate are anticipated and met. With a single reference point to monitor business unit activities, the relationships between corporate real estate and internal customers can be managed most effectively to support the company’s overall strategy goals.

  1. Streamline portfolio operations

Real estate asset management has become a competitive weapon that can fuel revenue attainment and enable corporate goal achievement. You must be focused on: 1) managing leases, 2) managing landlord and developer relationships, and 3) accessing critical portfolio information instantly. The need to be efficient across the entire framework of corporate real estate operations has never been more critical to maximizing the benefits of negotiating with landlords, meeting goals for managing critical dates and costs, capitalizing on lease term opportunities, and ensuring GAAP, FASB and other financial compliance.

CoStar Real Estate Manager helps you increase operational efficiency through its embedded industry best practices that generate streamlined operations. The software’s ability to quickly summarize critical portfolio data can dynamically drive cost-saving real estate decisions for your company.

  1. Reduce occupancy costs

The challenge you face is that critical real estate information is often scattered throughout multiple systems and locations, making it difficult to measure and analyze real estate utilization and operating costs. You need to be armed with vital, integrated intelligence about your real estate so you can make impactful decisions that: 1) find and eliminate excess expenses, 2) increase efficiency of space in use, and 3) identify surplus space in their portfolio.

Good real estate decisions that result in reductions in occupancy costs can only be made if you can readily report on KPIs (key performance indicators) and metrics across your entire portfolio and sub-portfolio.

CoStar Real Estate Manager helps you reduce occupancy costs with powerful portfolio analytics that help define metrics to track location performance versus targets, realize savings from real estate expense audits and identify underperforming real estate assets.

  1. Optimize portfolio

When it comes to measuring utilization and operating costs for a corporate real estate portfolio, the ability to analyze performance and set real estate strategy for a location, business unit, region or market can be the critical factor needed to: 1) create an actionable plan for every location, 2) maximize location contribution to the overall portfolio, and 3) meet business unit goals.

To develop optimization strategies, you need to understand critical issues such as lease renewal options, early renewal with “blend and extend” strategies, space reconfigurations to improve efficiencies, and property dispositions that collectively contribute to a corporation being successful at disposing of unproductive real estate assets, allocating capital, meeting project dates and positively affecting real estate expense obligations.

CoStar Real Estate Manager integrates and provides critical decision points for individual location strategy review that ensure you make the very best decision to optimize your real estate portfolio.

  1. Results

Real estate performance is measured at multiple levels and from different perspectives across the organization. The common thread is completeness, accuracy and timeliness of critical information surrounding real estate assets and location performance.  CoStar Real Estate Manager provides corporations with a complete, up-to-date and accurate view of real estate asset performance.  You gain the ability for real estate professionals to report results that enable preemptive strategy and initiatives corrections to drive continued improvements throughout your organization.