Serving more than ten million retail tenants each week in the southeast and mid-Atlantic regions, this CoStar Real Estate Manager customer is one of the largest supermarket companies in the US with more than 1,300 stores and over 70,000 employees.

More than 90% of these locations are leased and result in the company’s real estate department being responsible for managing 1,900 active leases and another 22,000 real estate-related documents.

Serving more than ten million customers each week in the southeast and mid-Atlantic regions, this CoStar Real Estate Manager customer is one of the largest supermarket companies in the US with more than 1,300 stores and over 70,000 employees. More than 90% of these locations are leased and result in the company’s real estate department being responsible for managing 1,900 active leases and another 22,000 real estate-related documents.

The Problem  

Initially, the company tried to rely on a combination of five, non-integrated internal corporate systems. Because information was coming from so many different sources, reporting was particularly difficult for the real estate team and hindered people at all levels of the organization from making good and timely business decisions about the real estate portfolio. The lack of easy access and visibility to real estate data also resulted in costly oversights for the company.  Rent overpayments had been made to the tune of almost $200,000 and on two other occasions, lease renewal critical dates were missed and resulted in a total of $4.1 million in penalties.

The Solution

In 2002, the company selected the CoStar Real Estate Manager retail edition primarily because it is a cloud-based system easily accessible from anywhere and at any time, and because it readily integrates with their other critical business systems. A phased implementation of both the portfolio management module for lease management and the project management module for transaction management was successfully executed by Costar Real Estate Manager and helped the company start gaining value from the system right away.  The implementation process included migrations of all existing real estate information, integrating CoStar Real Estate Manager with three other business systems, launching the project management module and deploying functionality for entry of lease charges.

Result

With CoStar Real Estate Manager in place, the length of the decision process for store selection has been shortened, and the company can make better, more confident store selections based on detailed information provided in the system.  Employee efficiency and productivity increased and the role of the real estate information manager in the audit process was reduced by 30 percent.  With leases scanned and available for viewing within the system, internal phone calls were reduced by 70 percent.  The availability of electronic files also means that hard copies of leases and other legal documents are rarely touched, reducing the number of these documents that had been lost in the past.  Summing up the value of CoStar Real Estate Manager, the customer says, “It is literally going to be our [growth] vehicle and we would not have been able to make that [growth] decision without CoStar Real Estate Manager being on board.”