CASE Study: General Growth Properties

Real-time Property Data Allows Leasing Agents to Better Manage Tenants and Increase Revenue

Industry: Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT)
Facilities: >200 Malls, >200 million sq. ft., >24,000 retailers
FM: Systems Solutions: FM:Interact
Client Since: 2003

“Not only has FM:Interact reduced the cost of maintaining accurate property information, but now our leasing agents and potential tenants can visualize critical property information in real time – helping us generate more revenue.”
Kevin Moss
CIO
General Growth Properties, Inc.

Background
General Growth Properties is a publicly traded Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker symbol GGP. GGP and its predecessor companies have been in the shopping center business for over fifty years. Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, GGP has more than 5,000 employees nationwide.

Facilities and Property Overview
GGP owns, develops, operates, and/or manages shopping malls in 44 states. As of March 2004, GGP had ownership interests in and/or management responsibility for more than 200 regional shopping malls totaling more than 200 million square feet of retail space. GGP also has the distinction of being the largest third-party manager for owners of regional malls. The company’s malls feature more than 24,000 retail stores and anchor department stores, as well as theaters, restaurants, ice skating rinks and other forms of family entertainment.

Challenges
The Tenant Coordination Department of GGP is responsible for helping leasing agents get new tenants open quickly by streamlining the architectural planning and approval process. The department is also responsible for maintaining CAD leasing and site plans which are used by various departments throughout the company.

Maintaining such a large number of leasing and site plans, and keeping up with actual as well as planned changes to the properties proved to be a very labor intensive job and required continuous manual updates to CAD drawings. The company had used an outsourced solution that required seven CAD coordinators to update drawings on a quarterly basis based on manual mark-ups submitted by each property. As a result, the time lag between identifying required changes to leasing and site plans and making plan updates widely available created opportunities for error.

Since having an updated CAD drawing of each property was essential to maximize efficiency, the company began looking for a solution that would leverage the CAD department’s daily work, and publish that content in a way that would engage leasing representatives and property managers, and encourage a free flow of communication based on up to date information.

Solution
During its search for a new solution the Tenant Coordination Department sought to cut administration workload and to find a product that the CAD group could adopt internally to avoid the recurring costs associated with the outsourcing, as well as provide self-service access to current information for the departments they support. The end goal was to provide the leasing department with up-to-date property information through an easy-to-use intranet portal.

After reviewing several options, the group decided to implement FM:Systems’ flagship product, FM:Interact. The solution provided easy integration with AutoCAD as well as a high level of openness that allowed GGP to connect their property management system to a wide range of other data sources. For example, Tenant Coordination connected the property management system to its CRM solution to provide leasing with critical data such as market demographics, leasing data, mall data, etc. This made the product even more useful to leasing agents.

According to Jeremy Kopstein, CAD Coordinator for General Growth, “FM:System’s solution is incredibly flexible and with hundreds of properties and leasing agents, we needed a solution that would allow us to produce drawings once and publish in various contexts. FM:Systems gives us that flexibility and much more.”

Results
Since implementing FM:Interact in 2003, over 600 leasing representatives and property managers now have access to up-to-date property information through an easy-to-use web-based interface. It has also dramatically reduced the time required for the CAD group to maintain accurate drawings which frees them up to focus on obtaining the best storefront designs from our new tenants, which enrich the shopping environment and experience.

As a result of implementing FM:Interact, the Tenant Coordination Department has seen a significant decrease in incoming requests from the leasing department. Each representative can drill into a space to view lease plans, aerial photos, storefront photos, etc. States Moss, “It is a leasing representatives window into their data.”

By offering the ability to color and cross-hatch data to show vacancies, expiration dates of tenants, occupancy costs, etc. leasing can quickly determine where they need to put their emphasis in remerchandising available space. The data has also become an essential sales tool to drive additional revenue by allowing leasing reps to quickly view other information such as various metrics relating to tenant sales performance. Better and more efficient merchandising of space is good for the company as well as its tenants.

General Growth also has plans to use FM:Interact as a platform for continuous improvement. Given the software’s ability to publish to the Web in multiple formats, GGP has various additional R&D projects using FM:Interact to deliver other customized data products to its various customers.

Kevin Moss, CIO for General Growth states, “the technology from FM:Systems has made our CAD drawings a living, breathing thing. Not only has FM:Interact reduced the cost of maintaining accurate property information, but now our leasing agents and potential tenants can visualize critical property information in real-time – helping us generate more revenue.”