SiteRise aims to bust retail real estate managers out of their silos
Are you a project manager for a big national brand retail chain with several new locations going up in five or six regions and regional managers sending you weekly updates on leases and project timelines via local or cloud spreadsheets?
And are you climbing up a wall right now?
Dillon Okner, a former retail construction manager at Apple, was just like you, shuffling weekly reports filed individually like playing cards and praying that he would be able to close his deliverables gaps efficiently and on schedule. Rarely did any full houses turn up.
Today, Okner is a founding partner of SiteRise, an online platform used by all of a brand’s regional construction managers who log drawings, leases, documents, and timeline updates in real time-- eliminating siloed data reporting across development teams and giving them instant updates on how projects are progressing cross-region.
“At Apple, we had five real estate directors, each one with his or her own file format for how they reported every week,” Okner said. “Our goal at SiteRise was to finally eliminate siloed data across development teams and create a new standard for portfolio management.”
Okner founded SiteRise because he felt that local or cloud spreadsheets were not built to efficiently communicate redevelopment timelines. Its dashboard is customized with reporting categories such as RFIs, change orders, and punch lists.
“When you have a unified system in place, it gives your whole team confidence,” noted Okner. “One hundred percent of retailers say every department is siloed. With SiteRise, if the architect makes some changes in the design, everyone knows immediately that a change has been made. If you’re building out a gym space and the standard number of treadmills won’t fit in it, purchasing is immediately made aware of it.”
Keeping track of budget updates makes buildouts complex, so SiteRise includes a budgeting tool that allows changes to be noted by headquarters and all on the construction teams.
“In traditional lease management, if there’s a change, I’m marking it up with my pen,” Okner said. “With SiteRise, you can do that in the tool natively. If you’re the boss and want to see how a project’s tracking, everything you need to know lives in there.”
