Almost every industrial and office leasing operation starts on a spreadsheet, and for good reason: it's fast, flexible, and everyone can read it. The tracker doesn't fail because Excel is bad at math. It fails at concurrency (five people, one file) and memory (what changed, when, and who knew).
What does Excel actually do well?
Be honest about the strengths before replacing them:
- Zero learning curve for the team and for brokers.
- A grid is genuinely the right shape for a rent roll snapshot.
- Total flexibility — a new column costs nothing.
Any replacement has to keep that speed, or the team will quietly go back.
What are the five signs the tracker is breaking?
- Version drift — "Leasing_Tracker_FINAL_v3 (2).xlsx" is in three inboxes, and nobody is sure which is current.
- One-writer bottleneck — updates wait for the one person who owns the file.
- Silent collisions — two brokers work the same suite for different prospects and find out at the LOI stage.
- Expirations by memory — renewals surface because someone remembered, not because the lease end date raised its hand.
- No history — the tracker shows today's state, never how a deal moved or when a bay went vacant.
If three of the five sound familiar, the spreadsheet is already costing deals — the cost is just invisible because it arrives as "we found out late."
What breaks first — the data or the follow-up?
The follow-up. Data errors are annoying but visible; missed follow-ups are silent. Broker updates arrive by email and text, get read, and evaporate — they never reach the tracker at all. That's why the fix is not "a better spreadsheet" but a system that captures updates where they happen and stages them for review. (It's also why the industry's AI results are so uneven: Colliers describes an "AI productivity gap," with the overwhelming majority of CRE firms piloting AI while only a small fraction reach their goals — pilots bolted beside a broken record don't stick.)
What does the first week off the spreadsheet look like?
Done right, the migration is an import, not a project:
- The existing tracker seeds the system — properties, buildings, suites, tenants, leases. (The one we most recently replaced was an 11MB workbook covering a multi-park Central Florida industrial portfolio; it became the live system of record in a weekend.)
- The team keeps editing the same facts — now with every change attributed and instant rollups.
- Broker updates start flowing in as staged suggestions to review, instead of emails to remember.
The spreadsheet earned its place. Retire it with respect — and keep its best trait, which was never the grid. It was that everyone trusted it.