Software
Software solutions arose in the mid 1990s to help companies and lease administrators manage their real estate portfolio and deal with increased government regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley. Software tools include database management, critical date management, lease auditing, expense management, lease accounting and ad-hoc reporting.
More recent developments in this industry have led to the release of cloud software applications which provide a web-based platform and are usually priced on a subscription basis with minimal if any capital expense cost and monthly or annual fees.
More advanced lease administration software systems are now providing extensive bolt-on functionality such as charting, mapping, demographics, project management, contract management, asset management and business intelligence reporting.
Increased functionality, better technology and increased customer take-up has seen the investment in software systems for lease administration increase significantly since 2000. In recent years there have been numerous take-overs and mergers of vendors including industry leader Accruent being acquired by Vista Equity Partners (January, 2010) before buying Siterra (March, 2011); IBM acquiring Las Vegas-based software company Tririga, Inc. (April 2011) to compliment its Smarter Planet initiative; and CoStar Group's acquisition of Atlanta-based Virtual Premise (Oct 2011).
Since 2010 the pending changes to the FASB and IFRS lease accounting standards that are proposed to treat real estate leases as capital and not operating leases has seen an increase in the take-up of software systems by both tenants and landlords.
Read more about this topic: Lease Administration