The project that seeded PARCEL, as Jack Huntress recalls it, was quite a challenge.  GE Capital needed to conduct due diligence for 76 properties, and it had to be done in three weeks. Traditional reporting methods, like pen and paper, couldn't possibly handle the data logging required for such a large project, and such a tight turnaround.  There had to be another way.

A mere 22 days later, the project was completed, and a powerful new property assessment and reporting tool had been born.  Three years later, that tool, known as PARCEL (Property Assessment Reporting to Centralize and Evaluate Liability), is the most comprehensive web-based system for property due diligence - environmental, engineering and evaluation - on the market today. 

With PARCEL, field data for a Phase I Environmental Assessment - once painstakingly collected and recorded manually - can now be gathered using a handheld device and automatically uploaded to a web-based database.  Add PARCEL's ability to incorporate supporting documents  - like photos, its compatibility with web mapping and plotting services, and the ability to easily ship hard copies, and the result is a software platform that has significantly streamlined the property assessment and reporting process. 

"One client has told us that they are saving as much as six hours on preparing reports for portfolio transactions," says Huntress, Director of Sales with the Boston-based Innovative Technology Application Group (iTAG) at Jacques Whitford.  "End-users of PARCEL have told us that we have the only third-party platform that truly works for them."

While the challenges posed by the project, completed in the fall of 2001, provided considerable motivation to develop PARCEL, Huntress says he and Guy Tassinari, Manager, iTAG, had been kicking around the concept for a centralized, streamlined reporting system for some time.

"On former projects, we had been using handheld devices to collect water samples, and that provided us with some inspiration.  We got the project on a Friday afternoon, and, within seven days, we had developed a handheld application for data acquisition."  

Huntress says the next seven days were spent developing the web database, as a team collected data in the Midwest.  And, during the final whirlwind week, the data was assimilated, organized into reports and shipped off to the client.  PARCEL had made it all possible. 

The simple reporting tool that resulted from that large project has evolved considerably since then, thanks to a combination of hard work and good fortune.

"We've been fortunate to recognize and catch opportunities to develop PARCEL as they arise, particularly by serving our clients' needs.  And, by serving multiple clients, we've been able to develop the most comprehensive and robust tool of its kind for commercial and capital lenders, as well as consultants."

This summer, PARCEL reached a major milestone, welcoming its 1,000th user, but Huntress sees considerable potential for growth.

"There are upwards of 200,000 large capital/commercial real estate transactions each year and less than 5% of that marketplace is currently served by platform-assisted software like ours.  So the market is wide open, and we will continue to build share by proactively understanding and enhancing PARCEL to meet the changing needs of clients."

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