Digital Lease Tracking -- Need Web-based Management?

"Business as Usual" ... As I write this introduction, I'm listening to Eric Clapton's haunting Tears in Heaven. How appropriate. Business will never be "usual" again for a long time after last week's tragedies. This Dispatch deals with a familiar theme -- using a web-based tool to make your business more productive. I wrote it a few days before September 11.

Track Your Leases over the Web... Say that you have hundreds or even thousands of leases to abstract.  Where do you turn?   One company to consider is Asset Management Technologies, based in Charlotte, NC.  I met recently with co-founders Scott and Dan Schubert in San Francisco.  AMT is a consulting firm specializing in lease abstraction that has developed AMTdirect, an ASP-based lease administration and document management system, to expedite the abstracting process.

An ASP, Application Service Provider, means that you access your information through a web browser and that the information resides on your ASP's server.  AMTdirect's service, which runs $2 per lease per month, includes multiple security levels to restrict access to authorized personnel.  You can export your lease information to AMTdirect from a variety of property management programs or enter the data yourself.  If you hire AMT, volume lease abstraction services run in the range of $150 to $250 per lease.  Lincoln Property Company is the largest client that AMTdirect has signed up for its service to date. 

In the next couple of Dispatches, I'm going to write about two different web applications focused on a specific part of the real estate process -- facilities management and data integration.  After spending time with all of these applications, I always walk away impressed with their functionality and utility.  And, yes, I know that they all have worthy competitors! (See below.)  But the reality is that populating any of these systems, maintaining them, and training staff to use them is a formidable task.  So the challenge that they all face is adoption.  And that involves a long education process with lots of sales presentations and product support. ... Other lease administration applications include BayLogics, Facility Wizards, KBA Lease Services, ManagePath, MyContracts, National Facilities Group, Peregrine Systems (today's sponsor!), ProLease and VirtualPremise.  See the whole list of 22 in the Lease Admin category at PikeNet.

--Peter Pike / ppike@pikenet.com