How do you know if you’re efficiently managing the buildings you lease? How do you integrate those leases with those of the buildings you own? Whether you’re a company, government agency or school, if you have a significant real estate portfolio with a large amount of square footage—and particularly if your buildings are spread out across multiple locations—lease management software will place a vast amount of information about all the facilities in your portfolio at your fingertips, enabling you to make informed, data-driven decisions. Lease management software is designed to give you a single comprehensive view of your portfolio and to optimize efficiency as a whole. It’ll help you lease the right amount of space to suit your needs without wasting money on unused areas. With the aid of lease management software, you can achieve your strategic real estate objectives, all while maintaining compliance with the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and other regulatory agencies.

How Lease Management Software Ensures Efficiency

Whenever you lease buildings owned by other companies or persons, each individual lease will likely come with its own terms and renewal date. If you’re leasing a handful of buildings, it’s difficult to keep track of all those varying dates and terms without using some form of a lease management system; if your portfolio contains dozens or even hundreds of facilities, it’s close to impossible. The conclusion of each lease brings with it another set of considerations: When you decommission operations at one of your facilities, will you remember to make sure you get your $60,000 security deposit back? If you’re using IBM TRIRIGA®’s Real Estate Manager software, you will. In addition to managing your real estate contracts and your property and space use agreements, Real Estate Manager keeps track of all your obligations and rights under each of your leases to ensure nothing slips through the cracks.

In addition to helping you keep accurate lease records and notifying you of any due dates or obligations, Real Estate Manager will help you make the best data-driven decisions when the time comes for lease renewal. You can use it to explore and compare different options, which will help you determine the path that will work best for your organization.

How Lease Management Software Saves Money

Lease management software is a money-saver for lessors as well as lessees. When you’re considering the best uses for any surplus buildings in your portfolio, leasing could be a more efficient and profitable option than either selling or refurbishing them for some new purpose. For example, one university owns 90 buildings across multiple campuses and in various other locations. It leases ten of these buildings, thus bringing in consistent income to the university on properties that would otherwise sit unused or underused. Lease management software like Real Estate Manager makes it possible to review your portfolio to look for underutilized spaces, then gives you enough information to decide whether it would be more efficient to lease them or sell them.

Tracking all of your lease, space use and service level agreements will help you determine whether you’re getting the right rates for your property, while tenant tracking—keeping track of all accounting matters relating to your tenants such as current rent rates, security deposits and lease expiration dates—will help you keep your accounts current. Lease management software is especially useful if leasing is not one of your organization’s core services; if leasing is a side business for you, it can give you all the information you need to stay on top of all lease-related matters while keeping the need for additional specialized hires to a minimum.

Built-In FASB Compliance

Deadlines are approaching for all businesses to be in compliance with updated FASB requirements, in which all operating leases will soon be recognized on the books as capital. If you’re already leasing property, you’ll need to examine your existing agreements to determine exactly what the new standards mean for you in terms of modifications to your reporting. IBM TRIRIGA’s Real Estate Manager can help you track all the critical information about leases required to be in compliance with these new lease accounting standards.

Complying with the new standards is likely to be a complicated—and confusing—procedure. Fortunately, eCIFM and IBM developed and updated TRIRIGA and Real Estate Manager to be in compliance with the new standards from the time they were announced. If you’re concerned about the time and effort that will be required to examine every lease in your portfolio to make sure you’re in compliance with the updated standards, this is the optimal time to start using lease management software. Not only will you be assured of compliance, you’ll also reap all the benefits of cost savings and increased efficiency that this software can provide to you.

The eCIFM team features some of the world’s leading TRIRIGA experts. If you’d like to learn more about how Real Estate Manager can track and manage your leases, as well as all the other ways TRIRIGA and eCIFM can help save your organization time and money, we’d like to hear from you. Contact us today.