The Evolution of Lease Administration
By Jeff Tosello
For years, lease administration was reduced to a service that was:
-Nice to have but not essential,
-A free service your real estate broker gave you, or
-A software program that your administrative assistant ran in between other projects.
These solutions were better than completely losing control over your real estate obligations but lacked several important elements necessary to truly create value for your organization. Further, they did not respond well to concerns about financial integrity relating to reporting obligations.
Today’s lease administration is more than just managing addresses and expiration dates for leased properties. A properly integrated real estate function does all of the following:
-Tracks all property obligations and opportunities,
-Integrates with business unit and enterprise-wide strategy,
-Incorporates and supports multiple departmental disciplines, and
-Complies with internal audit requirements relating to the financial management and reporting that the portfolio requires.
These important aspects of a fully-functioning, enlightened real estate process cannot be achieved with software alone and are not well managed by inexperienced personnel motivated only to execute tasks and be content with the status quo.
Corporate real estate departments require accountability for results which means that there has to be a formally articulated work plan, regularly measured progress, and reliable and agile collaboration and reporting responsive to a dynamic landscape of risks and opportunities. Lease administration or more broadly, corporate real estate support services, are an important part of enabling practically every other service we deliver across the real estate services spectrum.
If this approach makes sense, you should know that our lease administration team is fully capable and already delivering on this level. If you are still defining lease administration as an after-thought and unimportant to the delivery of your services, you may want to reconsider if you are delivering truly strategic services.
How do you define lease administration?
Tags: corporate real estate, support services
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 at 9:00 am and is filed under Lease Administration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.