Investment Managers Turn to Technology

When the parent company of Bennigan’s filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection last summer, LaSalle Investment Management relied on web-enabled business intelligence software to reassure property owners and investors about the impact on their portfolios. “We had limited exposure,” says Eric Schultz, a portfolio management associate at LaSalle, a wholly owned but operationally independent division of Jones Lang LaSalle Inc.

LaSalle has about $54.1 billion of assets under management invested in private real estate–both separate accounts and commingled funds–and publicly listed real estate securities. But Schultz says he was able to research the effect of the bankruptcy of the faux Irish bar and grill almost immediately, thanks to the LaSalle’s complex suite of investment management software.

Investment managers are increasingly replacing spreadsheets with sophisticated business solutions designed to provide global, up-to-the-minute access to data. “It’s not like you can’t get the same data from an Excel spreadsheet,” Schultz explains. “It’s just that these solutions are much faster because the data is integrated into a centralized system that allows you to search or research specific tenants or industries.”