Transparency Online... Want to know what properties Principal Real Estate Investors currently offers for sale? It's easy. On Principal's home page, click For Sale, and then Quick Search. You'll find 23 properties from Arizona to Massachusetts with physical details, pictures, maps and contact information. (Clicking For Lease and Quick Search generates a list of 720 properties.)

Last week I had a fun conversation with Mike Lathrop, eBusiness Coordinator at Principal's headquarters in Des Moines, IA. Principal manages over $26 billion in real estate assets in public and private equity and debt.

Lathrop is the link between Principal's 450 real estate employees and the real estate technology development group of 16. Their first priority was to develop tools for Principal's clients "to show investment summaries, property information deal-by-deal, and business plans quarterly." So most of this work is not visible to the public.

Principal built its reporting programs around MRI (part of Intuit's Real Estate Solutions). All property information is pulled from its own database, which is updated by its third-party service providers, and made available to clients through a web-based interface.

According to Lathrop, "eBusiness coordination" works well for Principal. "As fast as technology changes, we've found it's important to have a dedicated person or team to fill this type of liaison role. ... We now have a Business Solutions Group of which I am a member. ... While being in the position of 'middleman' is not often an enviable position, our constituents in IT and the business production units are happy to have a single point of contact for their technology needs."

--Peter Pike