Accruent Wants to Mitigate Your Insurance Risks

Money Talks... Here's the headline: "Hot real estate technology company raises $10 million." Sounds like the old days, right. Except, it's not. It happened last month. Westmark-Harris closed on a $10 million round of funding in November and changed its name to Accruent www.accruent.com. And earlier this week Accruent announced the acquisition of its sister company, MyContracts, thus rolling up Westmark-Harris, DealMover and MyContracts under common ownership. Accruent, which calls itself a "contract management software company," provides services to Fortune 500 companies, including AOL/Time Warner, Chevron and Morgan Stanley. These services include lease abstraction, document management and lease administration.

Let's say that you're a property owner or manager with hundreds or even thousands of leases. How do you track the insurance certificates that your tenants are required to provide? And that's not all. As Tom Turley, Vice President - Real Estate at MyContracts, points out, in addition to insurance certificates, you've also got to be concerned about "endorsements, additional insureds and waivers." So Accruent is offering a new service called Risk Mitigation Management, under which owners and managers outsource to Accruent the management of insurance certificates.

Here's how it works. Accruent communicates directly with tenants and requests the relevant documents. If a tenant doesn't respond, Accruent purchases the necessary insurance through ContractGuard (TM) and bills the tenant directly. Hence, ContractGuard (TM) actually provides the contingent general liability coverage necessary to protect the interests of a landlord in the event of a non-compliant tenant. The cost of this RMM service varies between half a cent and one cent per square foot per year, which Turley claims is substantially less than the three to four-cent cost that a landlord would normally incur policing this lease clause.

--Peter Pike