Accruent acquired Lucernex in 2017 to boost its IWMS or asset management portfolio. Lucernex Lease Administration & Accounting is a real estate lifecycle management platform emphasizing compliant financial contracts and accountancy.
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VTS
Score 9.7 out of 10
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VTS is an asset management and leasing platform built to provide real-time portfolio analytics to landlords and brokerage firms. VTS allows brokers and landlords to manage deal activity, a desktop or mobile device.
I believe Accruent is well suited for companies with a large amount of leased assets that need to be accounted for under the new accounting standard. Companies with fewer leases would not need an intricate tool of this size. It is suited for both real estate and equipment leases, which makes up the entirety of our portfolio.
The classroom and web-base training experience were very well-executed. Instructors and SME's in training were knowledgeable and helpful.
Upper management oversight of the projects provides the customer with confidence knowing that if escalations need to occur, issues will be handled.
Management was quick to make it right and switch our team when they recognized that there were some fundamental pieces missing from our initial SOW for our project.
We were misled that we would be utilizing Lucernex employees on our implementation. We have subcontractors from Sense Corp who do not seem that they are very familiar with the software. They often have to take questions away to ask (presumably Lucernex employees).
The implementation process is very inefficient. The upload templates are not straightforward, and there are "required" fields that are not designated as "required". Also, the sheer number of upload templates that need to be populated does not seem like the best way to get our information into the software. A guide to denote what each field on the template actually represents would be helpful.
You can tell that Lucernex is benefiting from the influx of business from ASC 842, and is trying to onboard as many clients as possible at the same time. This has caused a lack of attention to our implementation, and it shows with some frustration on our side with the implementation process.
VTS is still growing in its features on retail properties. As a product that originated in the office and broker world, it has had a learning curve for shoppiong centers. It has made great progress in the 2+ years we've been on the system, and there is more to come.
The defaults for the dashboards go into a longer time frame than how we look at production and leasing activity. We are year-to-date driven, and that view isn't readily available on the dashboards.
We are still working on getting Deal Approval flow active in our organization. We have a two-round approval process, and VTS currently is structured for a single approval round. We are finding ways to make it work, but it's still a workaround.
The trainers were knowledgeable and engaging in presenting the materials, and their emphasis on important concepts was helpful (I would rate the trainers themselves a 9!). However, I do not believe there's anything we learned in the in-person training that could not have been taught via live web-classroom. Traveling a significant distance (in our case) to Austin, TX for only approx. 12 hours in the classroom was (in my opinion) not necessary, since the same material could have been presented via live web-classroom and saved us the expense and travel-time. I would encourage Lucernex to consider moving to a live web-classroom format in the future; an online live format would still allow for participation and questions from the participants while saving clients' time and money
We chose Lucernex based on the commitment of building and maintaining the customer/vendor relationship to grow the product, the end user ability to configure the system and the systems functionality to complete all of our lease management needs.
We looked at a number of products when making the decision to go with VTS. What we found was that most of the other products in the space were either real estate addons to SalesForce, or an additional module to a software that was focused on another use, like accounting or property management. VTS was the only product we reviewed that was born, bred, and focused on commercial real estate. It became apparent that it was best in breed at the time, and they have been aggressive at making product enhancements and continuous improvement to stay the leader in their space.
It allows a small leasing team for the owner to quickly look over the entire portfolio and approve/alter proposals with a variety of brokers in a very efficient way.
It allows us to track space encumbrances and availability easily.
We've given access to our JV partners, and that has cut the number of conference calls sucking away time from our day by about 70%.
