How Leap Empowers Retail Brands Growth Strategy
Last Updated on June 28, 2023 by Morgan Beard
Life Before Occupier:
- Insufficient lease tracking using spreadsheets
- Each lease document lived in a variety of platforms
- There was no clear visibility into critical lease dates
Life After Occupier:
- One centralized location for all real estate transactions
- Real estate data guides strategic growth across the Leap portfolio
- Fully-automated rental expense tracking and critical date management
Results:
- 5 of new retail locations onboarded every month
- Currently have 20+ LOIs in play, 10 leases, 1 negotiation (May 2021)
- Have saved 5 hours per week in searching for emails and documents
INDUSTRY: RETAIL | EMPLOYEES: 50+ | LOCATIONS: 10+
Founded in 2018, Leap Inc. provides a seamless, low risk, fully-branded platform that handles the complexity of launching and scaling your omnichannel retail stores. From signing the lease and managing construction, to day-to-day staffing and operations, Leap delivers upscale, custom stores turnkey. Leap manages the leases of every storefront on their platform, building the retail footprint and acting as the liaison with landlords. This alleviates risk and empowers modern brands to grow their retail business in every direction.
This year, 2021, Leap is on pace for 400% growth increase from 10 to 50 locations, including NY, TX, CA, FL, AZ, and IL, and in partnership with 25+ retail brands including Rent the Runway, Faherty, Naadam, and Goodlife. In preparation for this growth phase Leap decided a real estate management platform partnership was imperative. “Occupier is able to keep up with us and grow with us. Their online real estate platform is exactly what we need, especially given the size and amount of deals we are doing,” Director of Real Estate, Rebecca Fitts.”
From Spreadsheets to Digital Lease Management
Leap first joined the Occupier platform in December 2020 to bring their document and lease administration tracking onto one digital source of truth. “We were going to over 10 deals, and google sheets wasn’t a viable solution for tracking data in real time,” said Fitts. It is tedious to try and strategize, negotiate and collaborate lease deals in a spreadsheet.
“It quickly became clear that in order to scale our business and to help retailers navigate the intricacies of lease management then we needed an all-in-one online tool,” said Fitts. The Occupier customer success team led onboarding and training for the Leap Real Estate team. “The process of transitioning from spreadsheets, multiple emails and slack messaging to a collaborative system like Occupier has been seamless.” With Occupier’s Lease Administration, all lease related communications, reports and tasks are consolidated to one collaborative place which is beneficial for our business.
Transaction Management Informs Strategic Growth Decisions
Physical spaces received a pause, reflect, and reset period in 2020. During this time, Leap was able to use Occupier to review and amend leases to keep properties full while helping brands maintain profitability. As doors began to reopen, the way in which consumers look to experience and engage with brick and mortar businesses has evolved. As Leap looks to expand its retail footprint, they need better tools to enable that growth.
According to Rebecca Fitts, “Occupier’s transaction management product gives our real estate team a holistic perspective into the full lease transaction lifecycle. I can track a deal and measure how the rent is escalating or deescalating.” The Occupier Transaction Management tool gives unique insights into your real estate pipeline. Each feature is plug and play from tracking deals and comps, to adding site selection photos and uploading key documents. “We began tracking all of our lease deal opportunities in this tool which I would estimate has saved us 5 hours weekly or over 260 hours annually,” said Fitts.
Communities Thrive as Retailers Expand their Footprint
The Leap Platform uses a cluster system to maximize the network effect of its storefronts in different retail markets. “An end-to-end solution like Occupier helps us, at Leap, take a mindful and informed approach to acquiring and managing our storefronts and properties,” according to Fitts.
“It is our belief that the world of brick and mortar retail not only builds community centers but our cluster model with physical storefronts enhances the overall customer experience and builds a positive connection between the retail brand and the shopper.” Occupier really enables the Leap team to approach real estate from a holistic perspective and account for the growth of our retailers in a thoughtful and strategic manner.
Scaling our Retailers businesses is possible…
With Occupier, tenants can reimagine how they can manage and approach their leases within their real estate portfolio. “We are in the midst of a tremendous growth phase and scaling our retailers businesses is all the more possible with an all-in-one real estate lease management platform like Occupier,” said Rebecca Fitts. Their end-to-end solution allows to acquire and manage our storefronts so that we can work with brands that complement each other in a given community and really take advance of those network effects.
“Occupier is central to the daily work of our Real Estate team.” It is where our Growth team can get up-to-the-minute information about new or pending properties for any brands we’re bringing onboard onto Leap. And our teams now have complete transparency into the real estate side of our business; so our entire organization can make more informed decisions and work together with ease on Occupier.
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