When you’re in the business of finding commercial office space for clients and providing advisory services, you can’t afford any slip-ups. And that’s why Advocate Commercial Real Estate Advisors was out shopping for software that quickly and efficiently handles lease administration for office building tenants.
Founded in 2003, Chicago-based Advocate Advisors provides a full range of commercial real estate services specifically for office users. After executing a new deal, they pull information out of the lease document and enter it in an Act! CRM database that has been customized to capture all the key fields.
From there, a workflow program alerts the team six months in advance of events such as a renewal notice, termination option, or expansion option.
It’s a smart, well-executed approach that puts Advocate far ahead of tenant rep firms that rely on a disjointed system of spreadsheets and calendar reminders for lease admin. But they knew they could do better. So CEO Craig Braham was on the lookout for software that would allow his company to up their lease-management game while continuing to use Act! as a CRM — which is what it’s best at.
“We just need a better repository for all the lease information,” Craig said on his first call with our head of sales, Max Porter. “Even though we have it in Act!, that’s not a perfect solution. If we have a client with a lease termination coming up and we miss the date, well, that’s just unacceptable. We can’t have it.”
Advocate needed a system designed with the specific purpose of providing lease information for its clients. Something they could look at every day to see a snapshot of what’s coming up. Ideally, it would supplement if not replace a manual system Advocate relies on for large portfolios.
“We have some clients, like Clark Hill, with a national portfolio. Let’s say 20 leases around the country,” Craig said. “Right now, we aggregate that information manually. It’s literally in a big book. And for some clients, they’re getting too big to do that. There are hundreds of pages in some of these things — charts, graphs, matrixes. So we’re looking for a lease administration system that will track all that data and allow us to run reports we can share with our clients or that they can log in and see on their own.”
Leasecake does all that and more for Advocate Advisors and many other tenant rep firms that need an intuitive, cloud-based tool for creating lease abstracts and monitoring business-critical, time-sensitive events.
To prove the point about what a good match Leasecake is for Advocate’s needs, we’ll even share a little behind-the-scenes story from a follow-up call Max had with a larger group of principals from the firm. At the end of the call, Sam Munaco, the president of the company, said, “Nice job, Max. I reluctantly logged onto this because I wasn’t sure what it was. But I’m glad I did.”
We love hearing that. Because as we see time and time again, when brokers, tenants, and landlords get a little taste of Leasecake — they always want more.
If you’re looking for a way to simplify lease administration and abstract creation, then try Leasecake for free and see how it helps commercial real estate tenants, brokers, and landlords save time and money.
