In today’s economy, under the pressure of tightening margins, every penny must be accounted for. Keeping costs low and occupancy high and making sure leases are on favourable terms, all while scrutinizing maintenance schedules and contractors’ performances, can be overwhelming and exhausting. Join one of our product gurus for a personal tour of 360 Visibility’s Property Management Solutions, being held every other Wednesday at 14:00 PM EST.

360 Visibility can help you manage your properties with:

• Lease Management – automating lease renewal notifications to proactively retain tenants on the most favourable terms possible.
• Forecast Operating Income – presenting accurate project lease revenues and operating expenses up to 24 months out.
• Reduce Administrative Costs­ – automating reporting and routine accounting tasks saves time and your bottom line.
• Maintenance Scheduling – strictly managing schedules and contractors to minimize surprise costs.
• Deal Management­ – automating lease execution from tracking deal negotiations and details.

Eliminate all the inefficiencies of multiple computing platforms, incompatible software, and redundant processes. Information silos become a thing of the past as you move forward with an integrated software solution from 360 Visibility. We simplify the way you do business, so you can for focus on what you do best.

Limited space is available, so register today!

Complete the registration to receive an invitation to our next 360 Property Management tour.

Much of this extraordinary shortfall, according to the survey, is centred in lost productivity among workers who, realizing their data is incorrect, are forced to compensate for the inaccuracies with time- and energy-consuming workarounds.

In the private equity real estate sector, the issue of data quality is particularly acute. Important information such as tenant exposure analyses, occupancy reports and portfolio-wide lease expiration schedules contain an abundance of personal details whose to-the-letter accuracy is critical to their effective application. But these documents are hard to come by and are often manually produced.

Further, most property managers still prepare their information on an annual – or, at best, a quarterly – basis. But rapidly changing market conditions very quickly render these reports outdated and irrelevant, leaving the company in the dark for a significant portion of the year.

More than that, much of the data is put together without the benefit of organizational guidelines that are designed to ensure consistency. In the absence of such structure, it’s virtually impossible for anyone with an interest to accurately consolidate the information, to slice and dice it for analysis purposes or to search across multiple reports.

The solution to this unsatisfying scene rests in the marriage of people and process, with technology the officiating enabler.

Companies that are looking to stay ahead of the competition should consider the following:

Getting on the Same Page

Many companies are locked into an Excel culture in which workers extract data from internal systems and load them to spreadsheets. From there, individuals conduct calculations and perform analyses that are never shared companywide. This produces multiple and oftentimes competing roadmaps. The confusion and potential risk that result from such an approach are legion.

Creating Standards

Ideally, a company’s data management initiative should aim to create a single version of the truth; in reality, many organizations have not even agreed on the definition of such critical particulars as revenue. They exist inside siloed data-management structures that do little more than support the disparate definitions of their current systems.

Landing on a single version of reality requires, at the least, cross-departmental consensus on how business terms (tenants, lease contracts, lease abstracts, service orders, approval processes, customers, products, KPIs, etc.) are defined. Start with published standards like annual reports and spread the word.

Appointing a Business Data Manager

Effective data management is crucial to a firm’s achievement of strategic and tactical goals. A cross-functional position requiring coordination with various company departments, the business data manager is responsible for the implementation and oversight of the company’s data-management goals, standards, practices, processes and technologies. Pick a soul with both the business experience to understand how data can be utilized within the company and the ability to communicate same with corporate executives and staff.

Investing in a Business Review

Every business process that’s broken, being handled by disparate systems, that’s being performed manually or maybe even not at all, is draining your company of cash.

A business review carried out by 360 Visibility will document your processes and facilitate your informed decision on the changes you need in order to get your data right.

Property managers must take a leadership role in this initiative. Only with their full engagement and commitment to cultural change will an investment in data management realize its full potential within their firms.

This solution will allow the Hamilton Port Authority to continue to grow with Dynamics NAV. In implementing 360 PropertyManager© to manage their properties and marina, they expect to gain significant functionality and maximize efficiencies.

Janet Knight, CFO Hamilton Port Authority (Left)/Jens Baun VP Sales 360 Visibility (Right) Capturing the signing of the agreement to deliver 360 PropertyManager© to the Hamilton Port Authority.
360 Visibility was selected by the Hamilton Port Authority (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) for their unique, proprietary property management solution that is built directly into Dynamics NAV 2009, unlike any other Microsoft Partner in North America.

“Dynamics NAV is familiar to our people, is reliable for standard business activities, flexible for our non-standard needs and scalable enough to grow along with us. With 360 PropertyManager we can continue to stay on our single-application platform with NAV, and we can keep integrating more and more of our business processes into the solution. 360 Visibility’s expertise with 360 PropertyManager and Microsoft Dynamics NAV makes them the right choice for this project’s success,” said Janet Knight, Hamilton Port Authority CFO. “We expect the move to 360 PropertyManager to provide significant value for our company.”

The current version of Dynamics NAV 2009 will have to be installed for the first phase of the project, upgrading Hamilton Port Authority from existing Dynamics NAV version 4.0.

360 PropertyManager for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009©
“360 PropertyManager for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 is a turn-key solution based on traditional NAV architecture, enabling us to provide Hamilton Port Authority and our other customers the benefits of implementing an out-of-the box solution that remains flexible and can be tailored to meet their needs” says Jens Baun, 360 Visibility Inc., Vice President of Sales.
360 Visibility is dedicated to offering industry-specific customized enterprise solutions to Canadian businesses. They are a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and located in Toronto, Canada. 360 Visibility’s Business Management Specialist provide businesses with the tools to efficiently manage their business, enabling them to seize new opportunities and circumvent common downfalls.

“We are proud to team up with Hamilton Port Authority and to provide them with a solution that will make it possible to integrate each of their business processes into NAV 2009 and 360 PropertyManager, ” declared Lynn Cooke, President and CEO of 360 Visibility.

Hamilton Port Authority
Since 1912, Hamilton Port Authority (formerly Hamilton Harbour Commissioners) has managed the busiest of Canada’s Great Lakes ports, Hamilton’s industrial port lands. The yearly cargo passing through Hamilton’s ports is approximately 12-million tonnes on more than 700 vessels. This accounts for over a 1/4 of all St. Lawrence Seaway Systems movements annually.

With approximately 150,000 square feet of office space, around 2,000,000 square feet of warehouse space, more than 9,000 metres of wharf and exceeding 600 acres of land, the Hamilton Port Authority manages an extensive real estate portfolio. Striving to be “The Great Lakes Port of Choice”, the Hamilton Port Authority lives by their strong mission statement of “Partnering for Progress”.

For more information:
Jens Baun, VP Sales and Business Development
Telephone: (905) 907- 3617
jbaun@360visibility.com

Janet Knight, Chief Financial Officer
Telephone: (905) 525-4330 #226
jknight@hamiltonport.ca

Property management ain’t the breeze you imagined it might be.

But there is help at hand. Property management software, to say nothing of the attendant professional expertise that would facilitate its installation chez vous, represents an eminently useful and increasingly sophisticated tool for keeping abreast of the complicated business of property management.

Property is a high-value asset, after all, and its inclusion is your portfolio is not to be trifled with. Property management software exists on a wide platform, from the simple to the complex. Research, on this front, bears fruit.

6 Steps to Choosing the Right Property Management Software Solution

1. Draw yourself up a property management checklist to help identify your requirements. Consider such essentials as reducing costs, overseeing maintenance schedules, handling contractors’ performances, calculating recoverable expenses, tracking deals and managing complex leases.
2. Shop for both software and software provider wisely. Compare product specifications with your identified business needs (it isn’t worth paying for bells you’ll never ring), and seek out endorsements from happy customers. Read reviews and accounts of other clients’ experiences.
3. Remember that there’s every possibility that your competitors will have gotten there first, and are already well equipped with software to keep their real estate interests in fighting trim. You and your manual approach are no match for that kind of intelligent control. Get equipped.
4. The best property management software boasts a range of features, including lease management, where lease renewal notifications are automated to proactively retain tenants on the most favourable terms; maintenance scheduling, where schedules and contractors are tightly managed to minimize surprise costs; and operating income forecasts, where project lease revenues and operating expenses are accurately predicted for terms of up to 24 months out.
5. Choose a provider with a track record. At 360 Visibility, where property management solutions span a wide range of applications (commercial, hotel, industrial, retail, residential and vacation), experience is wide reaching, and expertise is a given.
6. Remember the value of integration. A smart software solution eliminates the inefficiencies of multiple computing platforms, incompatible software and redundant processes. True property management efficiency can only be realized with a property management software solution that smartly integrates multiple avenues of functionality.