Tech Partnership to Drive Efficiency Gains for CRE Profession

Real estate occupancy costs are among the top expenses for every business, and organizations with multiple locations are at risk of wasting millions of dollars on unanalyzed portfolios every year, and months of human capital on performing the data entry and structuring required to gain necessary portfolio intelligence.

Savills Studley, the leading commercial real estate advisory firm specializing in tenant representation, has partnered with LEVERTON to augment the practice of lease administration and portfolio planning by combining LEVERTON's AI-powered data extraction technology with Savills Studley's Knowledge Cubed, the firm's portfolio analysis technology designed for global real estate occupiers. Together, the technology partnership will help portfolio managers save time and business save costs through improved design and performance of real estate portfolios.

Savills Studley and LEVERTON first tested their joint platform in an application that landed CoreNet Global's 2017 Innovator Award. In a new formal partnership, Savills Studley will deploy LEVERTON as one of the interconnected apps in Knowledge Cubed. A business can now input PDFs of leases and amendments into the LEVERTON app of Knowledge Cubed, which recognizes, structures and stores key property metrics. Compared to manual data entry and structuring, LEVERTON reduces the duration of the process by approximately 30 percent. Knowledge Cubed's analytical frameworks translate the data into visualizations that provide occupiers with a complete snapshot of an organization's corporate real estate holdings.

"Portfolio managers spend several hours a week performing data entry, customizing and integrating data with traditional tools like Microsoft® Excel® and Powerpoint® in advance of strategy meetings with senior executive teams," said Patrick McGrath, Chief Information Officer and Head of Client Technologies, Savills Studley. "Now with a single click or tap, occupiers can examine their business from any angle — whether it’s the operating costs of an entire portfolio or maximizing value at a single property. The time saved in obtaining robust real estate intelligence enables portfolio managers to fast forward to driving strategy, identifying value and strengthening decision making. For Savills Studley, this tool enables us to skip ahead to the consulting side of what we do, which has saved clients hundreds of millions of dollars in occupancy cost savings."

On working with the Savills Studley team, Abhinav Somani, CEO of LEVERTON said, "The dynamic capabilities of the Knowledge Cubed platform will allow our end customers to efficiently visualize and analyze the vast amounts of data that is inside their corporate and legal real estate documents. We're proud to be working with the forward-thinking minds at Savills Studley who have a unique understanding of the ongoing and future needs of occupiers. We're looking forward to building on the work we've started with them and providing even more insights to our global client base."

Savills Studley's partnership with LEVERTON comes on the heels of the appointment of McGrath to the role of CIO to drive innovation in occupier-focused technology for the firm. The partnership marks one of several innovations to be announced this year, all of which will bring improved analytics and consulting to the firm’s service offering.