TECHNOLOGY TOOLBOX

ntuit, the Mountain View, Calif., developer of familiar accounting and tax preparation software such as Quicken and TurboTax, has a real estate portfolio of about 2 million square feet (185,800 sq. m.) spread across about 100 properties. Intuit’s portfolio is primarily composed of corporate office space, software R&D centers and its six major customer contact centers.

   Nearly all of Intuit’s real estate is leased space, says Michael Gulasch,

Michael Gulasch is Intuit’s manager of real estate and advanced planning.

Intuit’s manager of real estate and advanced planning. That requires constant market analysis as there is a lot of churn in leased sites.

   “Our portfolio is primarily composed of smaller sites that turn over more frequently as leases expire,” Gulasch says.

   Intuit has grown rapidly over the past decade and during that period the company has used LseMod lease analysis software to keep track of its holdings. Intuit uses the LseMod Pro version for financial analysis and Gulasch says the software has been a time saver.

   “Certainly speed is a very important part of it,” Gulasch says. “If you look at the old days when we were trying to create a template for a one- off analysis for different properties, it took a lot of time and was necessarily consistent.”

   Gulasch says LseMod Pro serves up all the transactions needed for financial analysis of any particular action, then compares one transaction to another. Its benefits include straightforward use that allows anyone familiar with real estate vernacular to use it successfully, he says.

   “The spend elements are clear enough that a lay person can relate to them and at the same time, flipping all the way to the other end, a corporate finance executive or business leader has a 30,000- foot view of the whole picture.”

   Intuit uses the product in conjunction with its own product, CRE Manager (profiled in these pages two years ago).

   “We do use our own product very successfully, but it is designed for entirely different purposes,” says Gulasch. “LseMod is a ‘what if’ Excel- based financial modeling tool, whereas Intuit’s CRE Manager is a database asset management tool for tracking existing lease obligations, expirations, notices and payments. LseMod is for doing a workup and comparison of lease costs leading to a future transaction. Intuit CRE Manager is for tracking an existing lease’s terms and obligations. We use both products as they serve different needs.

   A particularly helpful feature of LseMod is an output that produces a one- page consolidated signature sheet

Software targeting economic developers is LseMod’s latest product.

that has a dozen categories of major spends and bottom lines of the current year spend and the total lease term spend, Gulasch says.

   Through the years, Intuit has requested small tweaks in the software, but Gulasch says it’s generally workable out of the package.

   “We’ve asked LseMod for a little more flexibility in terms of project set up and items it includes and they have made the changes,” Gulasch says. “It’s pretty good to go once installed.”

   LseMod has been around for awhile. In fact, Jim Duport, LseMod’s president, says he’s gearing up to work on version 12 of the software. The latest available product, released in early November, is an economic development comparison targeting economic developers.

   “They can use it to compare cities and states regarding costs, cost of living, SAT scores and they can do a real dollar financial analysis,” DuPort says. “They can use it as a selling tool to make sure they get into the show. It’s almost a marketing tool.”

   “My background is corporate and my whole perspective comes from the corporate side,” DuPort says. “You see programs written by brokers or programmers and they all have their own views. My view is corporate.”

   DuPort says LseMod upgrades have historically come from his corporate customers. He is soliciting input from customers for Version 12. DuPort says any company that does five or more leases per year can benefit from LseMod.

   “Over the last four or five years, virtually all of our improvements have come from customers,” DuPort says. LseMod’s array of 12 different products target niche markets.

   DuPort says his software works equally well in international markets.