Do You Really Need to Receive
a Lease in a Nano Second?

Will Technology Speed Up Real Estate? ... Last Tuesday's Dispatch, Where's the Balance? -- Partial Attention vs. Analysis Paralysis, raised the question, "Is there a way to speed up the real estate process?" ... This produced a number of intriguing e-mails, including two excerpted below.  Hey, maybe I'm a heretic.  But, holy cow, I wonder how much more bandwidth we really need?  After all, according to Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, "A single, hair-thin fiber in an optical network can simultaneously stream 400,000 DVD movies.  When you consider that the largest cable today contains 900 of these fibers, you can see how a previously unfathomable amount of information will pulse through the Internet." (Industry Standard, June 4, 2001)

According to Walt Spevak, Sr. Director Corporate Real Estate at Autodesk, what matters more to the real estate process is what's in a document -- not how fast you get it: "From a tenant's perspective, what could speed up the process and save lawyer's fees is if landlords and tenants could exchange a draft lease agreement with the basic terms and conditions that any reasonable agreement should include.  By that I mean mutual indemnification, right to measure the leased space, right to audit operating expenses, first right of expansion subject to existing rights, etc.  What a waste of everyone's time and money to check for which of the preceding items the owner's lawyer has left out."

Likewise, Alan Whitson of the Alan Whitson Company suggests three items that could save one to three weeks from the leasing process:  "(1) Landlord's basic lease document and exhibits online in a PDF Format.  This would expedite the legal review and lease mark-up.  Unless there is something in the fine print the landlord is trying to slip by the tenant.  (2) Operating expense data, current and historical.  If you have good property management this would be a selling point for the property.   Operating costs may account for 35% to 50% of rental rates.  (3) Floor plans & basic building drawings online in AutoCAD format to speed up the "must- fit" analysis.  [Peter: Good for Autodesk!]  Remember, the rentable square footage required to house a tenant may vary as much as 30% depending upon a building's design features: shape of floor plate, module, bay depth and core location/configuration." ... Keep your ideas on streamlining real estate headed my way; send me e-mail.  And ...

Spread the Word! ... Join LseMod, Hines, Propidex, REsolve Technology and Yardi, who are all sponsoring Dispatches this month.   Open dates are available starting in July.   Want more info?  Click the link at the bottom of the Free Dispatch box on the PikeNet home page.

--Peter Pike / ppike@pikenet.com