Commercial real estate software: the four jobs it covers

Commercial real estate software is a label covering at least four different jobs, and product comparisons routinely mix them, which is why they are so hard to read. Deciding which job you are buying for takes ten minutes and removes most of the field. This page is the four jobs and what each one actually needs from a product.

Managing what you own

Leases, tenants, rent and recoveries, work orders, and reporting to owners. This is property management with commercial lease terms on top: service charges, rent reviews, break clauses, and recovery calculations that residential software has no concept of. If your week is occupied by these, the recovery arithmetic is the feature to test first, because it is the one most often oversimplified.

Deciding what to buy

Investment analysis: cash flows, returns, sensitivity, comparison between opportunities. These products live in spreadsheets and modeling tools and have almost nothing in common with the management product. Buying a management platform hoping it will model an acquisition is a common and expensive mismatch, and the reverse is equally true.

Leasing space

Pipeline, enquiries, tours, proposals and the negotiation. This is a CRM shaped for leasing, and the thing to check is whether it hands over cleanly to whatever manages the lease once it is signed. A leasing tool that requires the whole lease to be retyped into the management system at signature is a tool that guarantees the two records disagree.

Reporting to whoever owns it

Owner statements, distributions, and the accounting behind them. Often this is the actual requirement dressed up as a management need, and it may be better served by proper accounting software with the property system feeding it. Where this hub sits is the first job at the small end: the record of the let, the documents around it, and the reports drawn from the same rows.

Questions people ask about commercial real estate software

Can residential software manage commercial property?

For a simple lease, sometimes. It breaks at service charges, recoveries and rent reviews, which are the terms that make commercial leases commercial.

Do I need one product for all four jobs?

Almost nobody does. Two good products with a clean export between them usually beat one that does all four adequately.

What is the most common mistake?

Buying for the job that is most visible this month rather than the one that occupies most of the year. Look at where your time actually goes before you look at anyone's features.

What is commercial real estate vacancy software?

Software for the leasing job: it lists vacant and soon to expire space, tracks enquiries and tours against it, and shows how long each unit has stood empty. Its vacancy figures are only as good as the expiry dates it is fed, so check that it reads those from the lease management record rather than from a second list someone keeps by hand.

What does commercial real estate lease analysis software do?

It models a lease or a portfolio of leases as cash flow: rent with its scheduled steps, free periods, incentives, recoveries and expiries, so a deal can be compared on effective rent or a property valued on its income. That is the deciding what to buy job, and its inputs are the same abstracted terms the lease management system holds, so the two should agree before either is trusted.

Commercial real estate software, and which of the four jobs you are actually buying for