Lease Abstraction for Dummies... Dale Vanderlaan, President of Chicago-based Realogic Analytics, wants to make your life easier. Well, actually he first wanted to make his life easier. So he streamlined the lease abstraction process by distilling ten years of his company's experience into the latest version of its software, Ellipsis 3.0, for both lease abstraction and administration.

Vanderlaan's theory is that building data should remain with an asset. Why not centralize all lease data and make it accessible for the full real estate life cycle -- due diligence, financing and property management? While it's true that each party will have slightly different needs, it's crazy to have everybody start afresh keying in the same data.

Ellipsis takes you through a three-step abstraction process -- determining the standard lease language, creating a checklist of items, and following a specific roadmap for each item. The result is that the software customizes itself to the appropriate tasks for each lease. Once the data has been entered, it can be exported automatically to a variety of programs including Argus, Dyna, MRI, Winstack, and even Outlook. For example, you could easily populate your Outlook calendar with critical lease dates.

As a demonstration of how Ellipsis data sticks to an asset, Vanderlaan pointed to the purchase of Hartford Plaza at 100 and 150 S. Wacker, a 1.1 million square-foot, two-building complex in Chicago. Lincoln Property used Ellipsis to abstract the 110 leases and to share this information with its venture partner and lender. According to Lincoln's Tim Incerto, Lincoln continues to use Ellipsis in its role as property and asset manager.

--Peter Pike