John Tobin has switched sides.

No longer does he work for landlords, but tenants, whom he now wants to help negotiate the best and most affordable leases.

Mr. Tobin, Partner of the Cleveland-based TENANT reps.net, spent the past 18 months developing Swiftcalc.com, a comparative lease analysis software designed to show tenants nationwide all costs involved in getting into, occupying and leaving space. 

``The second highest cost for a business after payroll is its leasing cost,'' Mr. Tobin said. "The software provides information the tenant doesn't normally have...Over and over and over again, I saw tenants needing something to complete a bottom line comparison. Without it, they were at an extreme disadvantage.''  With easy to use software, tenants and their advisors merely plug in the cost of rent, parking and moving expenses, as well as square-footage and other variables, and create bottom line cost comparisons of their leasing alternatives, complete with graphs and cash flows.

Swiftcalc.com gives retail, office and industrial tenants bargaining power that they might not have had before, Mr. Tobin said.

The software is available online or packaged, and sells for $689 or $489 after the rebate.

Prior to starting TENANT reps.net, Mr. Tobin spent 16 years negotiating commercial real estate leases, including a year as a senior leasing specialist in the Cleveland office of Grubb & Ellis Co. and eight years as an in-house lease negotiator for JMB Properties Co., which merged with Heitman Properties Ltd.