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espite the prolonged shakeout among occupants of commercial real estate Internet “space,” not all Web services catering to the industry are floundering. Indeed, observers of the market at its height all predicted the shakeout, and the economic slowdown has underscored its impact. It’s not that there isn’t a role for the Internet in the corporate real estate field — there clearly is, in fact multiple roles eventually. It’s just that the playing field between users and suppliers of pertinent information is still leveling (see the January 2001 Site Selection cover story). And that process doesn’t unfold without some casualties.
Online systems that do work — or appear to — in such an environment are all the more compelling, particularly as corporate real estate managers feel the pressure to use all means available to reduce operating costs and deliver space solutions more quickly. A case in point is a service called big-e-real estate from the Business Integration Group (BIG), Tempe, Ariz. (www.big-e-realestate.com). Cushman & Wakefield is the largest investor in BIG, but the relationship is not proprietary.
The big-e-real estate offering is based on integrated, Web-based modules that handle discreet tasks, including lease administration, project tracking, space management and work-order management and preventative maintenance. The modules are integrated in as much as they draw on data resident in a single database — on servers in Tempe, to be more precise.
A key objective of the service is to make real estate management information available to those who need it from wherever they need it provided they can access the Internet. This reduces or eliminates tasks associated with compiling reports requiring information housed in different systems or departments. More importantly, the strategic value of real estate comes more clearly into focus when portfolio information is accessible when and where key players in the organization need it.
Giving IT a Break
“We have eliminated the need for corporate America to rely on their internal information technology (IT) departments to provide real estate technology solutions,” says Albert Stabile, senior vice president at BIG. “We are responding to the need in the marketplace for centralized real estate information.” Stabile says that other Web services for the corporate real estate market have not been able to deliver as broad a suite of applications, requiring customers to use multiple vendors. This results in IT personnel having to link the systems, if at all possible. “They’re re-inventing the wheel every time they do this.”
Most IT departments support more divisions than just corporate real estate, so rising to the top of their to-do list can be difficult, particularly if the revenue-generating business units have long wish lists. BIG’s IT department supports only the real estate management clients it signs on, which include owners of space and corporate occupiers of space.
In fact, Cushman & Wakefield’s association with BIG helped it win a major new financial services account — Wachovia Bank, says Stabile. Two other finalists could not bring to the table as comprehensive a technology solution to the client’s multi-state property asset management issues. “The technology component will be more of a driving force than the relationships tied to transactions going forward,” he suggests. “That’s a bold statement, but it will only be a matter of time before more clients realize that technology can produce a significant amount of value.” (In April, Charlotte, N.C.-based First Union Bank announced plans to acquire Wachovia and to use the latter’s name. BIG’s CEO, Ron Savage, says he “is excited about the opportunities that will result from the merger.”) Other recent clients include Cable & Wireless and lease administration for 850 IBM Corp. properties.
The lease administration module of big-e-real estate provides document management, expense reconciliation and bill payment features, including real-time access to lease information. The system automatically notifies users via e-mail of critical lease dates and maintains a lease activity log. Users can scan and post all lease-related invoices to the Web site so that approvals can be expedited. Once approvals are obtained, the system generates a location funding report and updates the client’s accounting system. Customers can realize significant cost savings by reducing the resources needed to manage leases offline.
Space management features of big-e-real estate are designed to help clients integrate their AutoCAD, employee tracking and lease administration applications in order to better manage their space requirements. Web access to these tools enables users to create occupancy analyses and reports and plan moves or relocations remotely.
BIG operates a call center service where clients can report maintenance problems, which are handled by selected vendors — BIG can negotiate favorable service agreements with vendors by virtue of client scale. Information concerning these matters is stored in the same database clients use to house their portfolio information, so building and other records are kept current. A work-order management on-demand application helps clients close work orders over the phone or online using a Web interface. The service also offers a preventative maintenance module for managing routine service calls on equipment.
BIG’s Stabile says his clients can realize savings several ways relative to non-Web asset management means. The first is in reducing the real estate department’s dependence on IT time and resources. The second stems from not having to invest in multiple software programs that access to the big-e-real estate database replaces. Personnel costs are reduced, because clients can eliminate the expense of training new lease administration staff only to see them leave, necessitating a new hire. Managers can spend more time making business decisions and less time interviewing personnel to fill support positions.
“Unlike a software firm, we are mainly subscription based — we don’t make a sale and then go away,” Stabile points out. “We are paid on an ongoing basis because of the value we provide, and we have to earn that every day. We are incentivized to ensure that our clients are happy and continue to use the product to derive the benefit they can get from it.”
How Clients Benefit
Rockefeller Group Development Corp., New York, is BIG’s first developer and property management client, with lease and other information on 4.5 million sq. ft. (418,000 sq. m.) of office space residing on BIG’s servers. “We can look at a single space and find out a myriad of information about it, but one of the biggest things we wanted to accomplish from it was to determine whether or not the space was encumbered,” says Beth Dreyfuss, assistant vice president. “It’s hard to keep track of who has rights to specific spaces beyond the current tenant,” she explains, “and there doesn’t seem to be any other software available in my 20 years of looking that tracks that for us.”
By clicking on a stacking plan of the building and then on a specific floor or space on a floor, Dreyfuss can easily see who has leases with options or rights of first offer or other restrictions on that space. She can then view an abstract of the relevant lease to learn the details of the lease and the provisions that apply to the situation at hand.
“Rather than keeping paper lists of this kind of information, requiring trips to a file room and time searching through a lease file that might be a full cabinet drawer thick, we can drill down directly to the information we need,” she illustrates. Besides herself, Dreyfuss says marketing staff and property managers use the service, and others will as well as additional modules are activated, such as the work order management and preventative maintenance applications. “We cannot distribute copies of our leases to everyone here who might have dealings with a tenant, so there are constant phone calls looking into whether leases provide for things the tenants request. Users of the BIG service have access online to all of those documents.”
Rockefeller Group’s tenants will benefit, too, says Dreyfuss. Once the work-order management module is in place, for example, tenants will be able to enter an order, determine whether the service sought is free or whether a charge is involved. If so, the rates would be accessible, and tenants will be able to track the status of their request.
“We will use the service to improve tenant relations,” says Dreyfuss. “It will free up people’s time here to do things more effectively and efficiently and present a better face to our clients. There is a big customer-service component to our decision to use big-e-real estate.”
Others have had difficulty locating a single technology solution that addresses multiple requirements, as well. Newton Andrus, director of worldwide facilities at Novell Corp., Provo, Utah, was growing resigned to the inevitability of having to customize systems he purchased to manage the networking giant’s global properties. “Products available were all relatively new or in aggressive upgrades, so there was going to be the issue of keeping current with the latest versions,” he says, referring to his quest for an integrated solution. “We were interested in holding down headcount where maintaining the data and programs was concerned, as well.”
Andrus’s team came close several times to selecting systems but kept confronting the high integration hurdle. The BIG solution seemed to solve those problems, so Andrus gave it shot. “We were very interested in a Web-based solution and one that could be applied globally to our facilities in the United Kingdom and Australia as well as in the U.S. We knew over time we would be adding more buildings.”
Selecting BIG augmented work already under way at Novell in the area of facilities management; Novell had decided to outsource that function and turned it over to Cushman & Wakefield where the work-order management module was in place. Lease management was next on the migration list. The big-e-real estate system also came in handy as Andrus’s team was disposing of space at one Utah campus and managing the transfer of personnel to the other, in Provo.
“There was some pressure here to do more work on the Web, and this seemed like an ideal way to do that,” says Andrus. “Our real estate people are few in number and travel everywhere. To have the database available to them anytime was what we were after.” Besides which, Novell is a leading Internet technology company itself. “We knew we had to walk the walk,” he relates. “If we’re going to be a real estate facilities department for Novell, we have to do things in the same way the company develops the products it sells. If we had selected a standard, non-Web-based solution, there would have been a lot of pressure to change. So we made it a criteria from the start.”
