CLS Holdings PLC

CLS Holdings plc (“CLS”) is a commercial property investment company with a £2.4B portfolio. The total portfolio encompasses 6.3m sq ft and is mainly comprised of future-focused office workspace across the UK, Germany and France.

With over 780 tenants, CLS delivers consistent, long-term value and steady growth by investing in modern office space in secondary locations. The company’s success is based on a proactive property management approach and a deep understanding of its tenants’ business ambitions.

Business Challenges

CLS considers lease documentation to be amongst the most important information to run its business operations. Unfortunately, there was no single repository for these key documents and finding information was often time consuming and difficult. It was even harder if the leases had been varied over time.

In many cases, only highly skilled legal staff were able to fulfil data requests from other staff such as Asset Managers and Property Managers. This resulted in information and decision-making delays.

CLS faced several data quality challenges during the delivery of a large digital transformation programme. Migrating data from legacy systems to a new property and finance system (MRI X) created testing problems related to verifying the accuracy of key operational information over a dataset. Much of this data originated from lease documentation.

DealSumm Benefits

Processing CLSs leases into the DealSumm platform provided the following business benefits:

• A company-wide single source of truth for lease data in the same format
• All lease information (including non-commercial information) is easily accessible to anyone in the company, including Asset Managers, Property Managers, and the Finance and Legal Teams
• One system that supports lease abstracts in the company’s three operational languages (English, French, and German)
• Searching is enabled across the entire repository of leases
• Facilitates faster decision-making
• Quick and easily configurable management reports based on lease information
• The ability to integrate lease data with other systems and compare/verify the data against other systems
• A system that is constantly updated with lease amendments making sure that users get the latest information reliably

Results

“With our focus on proactive and value-add asset and property management, we needed a tool that would provide a simple way to search and quickly understand our lease data. With fast, accurate access to all our portfolio information, we can move more efficiently by reducing decision-making timeframes” said Greg Snow, Head of IT. “As a pan-European property investment company, it was important for us to leverage one solution for all countries we operate in. DealSumm provides a platform that enables us to have one single source of truth and align lease data with our other systems of record.”