This large, international staffing corporation manages approximately three million square feet of leased office space in major cities around the world. Central real estate teams work across business units and with regional transaction managers who handle all aspects of about 140 real estate projects per year.

The Problem:

This company lacked visibility into its real estate portfolio and needed an accurate system for creating system reports. They also lacked a tool for conducting strategic analyses of detailed and predictive metrics about their portfolio. Due to the numerous projects the company manages each year, they were further hampered by the absence of an integration of lease information with projects information, causing the team to duplicate entry of lease data into the projects area of the software.  Many projects were delayed due to the lack of centralized, accurate information that would help rack key milestones.  These challenges collectively put the company at a serious disadvantage because they were unable to accurately forecast capital spend requirements, leaving their fiscal year plans and budgets inaccurate and unreliable.

The Solution:

This customer selected the corporate edition of CoStar Real Estate Manager, including the portfolio, projects and strategy and analytics modules, as a replacement for their existing system. This included CoStar Real Estate Manager’s ad-hoc reporting tool, helping to produce exactly the reports they need at designated time intervals. The real estate team also has the ability to collaborate with business line leaders in reviewing portfolios for developing future plan needs, with CoStar Real Estate Managers critical lease date tracking.  CoStar Real Estate Manager helps them identify leases that are good candidates for renegotiating better terms. The strategy and analytics module aggregates information from both the portfolio and projects modules, enabling the company to get focused reports of forecasted versus budgeted versus actual project costs.  Lastly, CoStar Real Estate Manager enables integrations with other critical business systems, such as human resources, so that the real estate team can consider current and projected headcount numbers in their utilization of space assessments.

Results

The primary benefit to this customer of the strategy and analytics module in particular is that they can now forecast their real estate capital spend. In real-time, the real estate team can report on all projects the dollars forecasted for capital, the amount budgeted and the actual expenditures.  CoStar Real Estate Manager reporting capabilities also allow them to constantly monitor utilization by location, critical date or any other criteria needed to decide whether to terminate, downsize and relocate, or blend and extend.  The corporate edition of CoStar Real Estate Manager, combined with the ongoing lease abstraction services provided by CoStar Real Estate Manager, provides this customer with a comprehensive and integrated solution that is helping them make better real estate decisions that lead to cost reductions, improved profit margins and, ultimately, an optimized real estate portfolio.