Are We Making Progress? ... Last week's Dispatch, Corporate Real Estate and Hot Dogs, asked, "Do some folks still track real estate lease expirations on spreadsheets?" Oh, yes (!) several readers reminded me.

Scott Schubert, CEO of Asset Management Technologies writes, "...On the commercial side ... true lease administration is more recently getting recognized as a critical process with its own technology needs. ... But there are still large segments within many industry verticals that have not implemented an intelligent technology solution to help them control and streamline their lease information, documents and processes.

"Many of the [lease administration] systems today are dynamic and sophisticated, to the point where a number of the traditionally manual processes are 100% automated. This, coupled with the intelligent linking between the underlying contractual data and the actual scanned documents, has enabled huge time savings for performing research and analytical analysis across an entire company's contracts and portfolio data. ... The industry is making great progress, but we are still in the infancy stage of technology and its adoption within our industry."

Bill Maltbie, President of Attrieve, writes," Believe it or not, there are many corporations with 100+ locations that are not utilizing lease administration software. Or, they have tried to force an enterprise accounting system to do the job with mediocre results. Many have tried to design their own databases with lackluster performance. ... We recently encountered a public company that was unable to answer the question 'What is your total monthly occupancy liability?' in less than 2 days. That's scary."

TIMEOUT... As we enter the summer doldrums, PikeNet is taking a four-week break. The next Dispatch issue will be Tuesday, September 14. Enjoy your holidays!

--Peter Pike