It may still be a Goldilocks economy for commercial real estate, but it remains a highly competitive global economy as firms try to differentiate themselves from their competition. The smarter firms are discovering that by offering new value-added services to corporate clients, they can multiply their revenue streams as well as solidify their relationships with clients over many years. Goldilocks economy or not, though, finding those indispensable service offerings can be a bear – but not impossible, if one listens closely enough to the marketplace and to clients demanding more than just transaction-based services.

NAI Global has done some aggressive listening recently, and heard a common complaint about the limitations of lease administration software. Generally, they found that current software applications require too much customization and are too expensive to use, or have limited functionality and don’t provide the opportunity to expand and meet other corporate service needs of their clients.

In particular, it is the clients themselves who are demanding a greater range of services from their professional real estate consultants and in-house staff.

That is why NAI Global, in partnership with the leading infrastructure and facilities-management software developer Archibus Inc., has developed NAI CLAS. It is a simpler and more versatile Web-based real estate management software solution that goes beyond just lease administration, offering clients the opportunity to easily expand the value of their technology investments to their entire companies.

This new development collaboration is just the kind of “thinking outside the box” that is of growing importance in every industry on a worldwide basis. NAI Global and Archibus each have a large international network of professional and technology solution providers that can offer an integrated, enterprise-wide solution unmatched anywhere on the planet.

For many companies, lease administration technology is little more than Excel spreadsheets or Word documents stored away in filing cabinets. It is no wonder that companies lose track of upcoming lease expirations and options that often cost the company millions of dollars. But until now there has not been a simple, yet cost-effective, software solution to capture important property and operational information that can support even the most sophisticated Excel spreadsheet. The new NAI CLAS solution, powered by Archibus/FM, a software solution for infrastructure and facilities management, finally provides real estate professionals with a sleek but powerful solution to race ahead of their competition.

NAI CLAS begins with property and lease management and can grow to incorporate a wide range of enterprise activities drawing from the full-featured Archibus/FM applications that companies have been using for a quarter of a century. Integrated work orders and invoicing; enterprise-wide space, move and asset management; remote wireless data access and much more can now be offered in a fully integrated, end-to-end solution over the Web. Hence, the corporate real estate executive can start with a simple lease solution but quickly and easily extend that solution to other activities, providing the compactness and versatility of a Swiss army knife.

With Archibus/FM it doesn’t matter if a client is dealing with leases, easements and right-of-ways, work orders and invoices, or multiple documents for plans and contracts. Each of these items can be managed under one umbrella. And automating the critical date notifications and e-mail alerts is all contained within the embedded workflow of Archibus/FM.

Most importantly, Archibus/FM offers to the NAI Global network of service professionals and their clients the ability to easily personalize the application as a particular client may require. The “open architecture” of Archibus/FM has long provided this capability and has led the effort on a global basis to establish common data standards for tracking space and properties.

Now that capability is incorporated into NAI CLAS.

NAI Global is working with a number of companies that are introducing this streamlined software solution to their organizations and the marketplace. U.S. Steel, for example, is rolling out the NAI CLAS solution for several properties on the eastern seaboard of the United States. The properties are a complex grouping of parcels, some leased and some owned, which have a widely divergent set of uses and needs, from basic commercial, industrial and manufacturing activities to shipping, railways, pipelines and trucking. The NAI CLAS application will allow companies like U.S. Steel to manage their infrastructure assets in a more lean and economical manner and thus compete better against global pricing pressures.

The steelmaker’s real estate management department, which, like many companies worldwide, struggles to keep track of its leases and properties and when expirations and options are coming due, now can manage these issues in real time from anywhere in the world. Alerts are automatically triggered within specified date ranges, critical documents associated with key lease and property records can now be accessed over the Web 24/7, and important infrastructure data is now being captured and managed smartly, for the life of the company.

So whether managing a high-rise office tower in Boston, a steel-manufacturing plant in Philadelphia, a pipeline company in Texas, or finding sites for expansion in Europe or Asia, the NAI CLAS solution now brings a simpler, cost-effective lease and property management platform to a market that is still largely untapped. And it makes the NAI Global real estate professional a much more powerful player in the global marketplace.