CoStar offers a platform for real estate management needs.
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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.
In our market (Portland, OR), not enough users implement the tools that could make CoStar so much better. For example, I specialize in medical but brokers and owners don't take the time to mark medical as an approved use in their buildings so I have to search much longer and cross-reference the data by contacting the brokers directly.
I find it really annoying that when I download documents CoStar doesn't use smart technology to automatically name my files. It is especially irritating since every piece of marketing we post to CoStar has a relevant file name yet when we download the same file we have to rename it.
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.
One of our landlords requested we try VTS but we didn't continue because it was such a small portfolio it too more time to update the database than we wanted to spend
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.
Since CoStar has linked with LoopNet we have had fewer bad data calls. By which I mean old data from LoopNet that was available to the general public is now more regularly updated through CoStar so we have less confusion with our clients.
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%.
