IWMS? It’s Location! Location! Location!

Real Estate Softwre expert and Lucernex President Joe Valeri (see Joe’s management summary here) provides details of why Location is the key to Real Estate Technology.

My last blog discussed the very loose definition of IWMS and how it tries to describe a wide array of very different vendors. In this blog I will discuss one type of IWMS, Store Lifecycle Management, and what the RETAIL end users may need to focus on when select an IWMS (aka Store Lifecycle Management or SLM solution).

What are the three things that matter in real estate – Location, Location, Location. This old adage about real estate applies to retail real estate technology as well. The location is what real estate is all about whether you are a 2000 store retailer, a 30 building corporation, a large hotel company or a multi-building campus – everything you do in relation to your real estate is based on a location. And, managing the performance of each location to perform optimally is the ultimate goal for each location whether it’s optimizing revenue or minimizing cost.

Each industry is going to have different methods to achieve these goals based on their business goals. A retailer may focus on same store revenue growth or new store development, a hotelier will focus on REVPAR growth while a corporate occupier (owner of leased) is likely to focus on space management, cost control per location (or employee) or implementation of technology to achieve savings.

The tools each of these different users needs is therefore as different as the decision makers selecting those tools. Not surprisingly, the different types of real estate portfolio owners have organized themselves differently to reflect both their differing business processes and the importance they place on the different areas of functionality.

A retailer or hotelier, for example, will have less need for a CAFM system and more need for demographics and sales prediction. Facilities management is important to this audience but real estate selection is the business driver and therefore the decision maker is typically a real estate executive when it comes to selecting technology or other tools.

A corporate real estate department will have far more use for CAFM and no need for sales prediction. While the real estate function is important, the decision for non-retail corporate companies will typically be driven by the Facilities Management group.

According to a 2009 IWMS Connect article, this difference across many organizations is starting to blur as these roles are beginning to converge into a more “workplace” driven function.

However no matter what type of user you are, all the data you collect, work flows you manage, reports you generate, schedules you manage, work orders you cut or demographics you run are all centered around a location. Shouldn’t the technology you choose to manage it center on the location as well?

By centering on the Location you can:

• Track all entities within your Portfolio or aggregate information to track your entire Portfolio
• Track all Center information including Leases
• Track all Facilities and equipment on a Campus
• Track each tax Parcel within the Location
• Track multiple planned Locations by market in multiple Programs
• Manage all collected data for multiple Sites of interest for every planned Location
• Manage as many Construction Projects as you want on one or more tax Parcels of the same or different Prototypes
• Maintain as many Facilities as you would like across one or more Programs
• Track all Spaces in each Facility, how they are used and the associated Leases.
• Run as many Capital Projects as you need
• Administer multiple Leases and subleases on a group of Facilities or on individual Facilities
• Track all real estate related Contracts for Equipment, Land, Services, etc….
• Maintain as many Franchisees information as required in the same or across multiple Facilities
• Track all Lease income and expenses on any Facilities or Location

Shameless plug