As your business ramps up into growth mode, lease administration probably isn’t a top priority, but if the proper foundation isn’t laid here, then you may be setting yourself up for inefficiencies and overstaffing. At this stage, many operators rely on spreadsheets, manual data entry, and attorneys to perform admin work. With a lean back office team, contesting CAM charge increases, chasing down tax bills, tracking new unit development, and figuring out who’s responsible for repairing the HVAC each needs to be a seamless process. But who’s in charge of pulling the relevant information from your leases when you need it? And when lease terms change, who updates your multi-departmental team?
Every department is busy, and if centralizing lease data is an afterthought, it’s not uncommon for organizations like yours to end up with multiple data silos that don’t integrate with each other. Plus, you're paying fees upwards of six separate vendors, each only taking care of one specific part of your lease administration needs. Option and estoppel deadlines are missed, late fees stack up, and the time your team could be spending on business growth is lost. To close the gaps in your systems, consider your lease administration needs from end to end: who’s involved? How do their data needs intersect? What could be better integrated?
We recommend taking a holistic approach to lease administration to ensure that every facet of your operations affected by your lease terms can be managed within a single, unifying platform. From acquisition through operations to disposition, robust software can streamline every stage in your lease portfolio lifecycle. When considering a lease management solution, the following departments need to be factored into a decision:
While you could have an attorney do your lease abstracting, you’ll be paying attorney fees for the privilege. Or you may run into abstracting services that offer low rates by excluding certain lease components from the abstracts, resulting in incomplete abstracts and missing data.
Once your lease data is abstracted into a centralized tool, you’ll easily have access to a list of your locations, customized to fit your naming conventions, with real-time alerts notifying you of critical dates, missing information, and other issues that require your attention. This will make it easy to apply a balanced approach of automation and human stopgaps to ensure updates are made in a timely fashion.
The aim is to help avoid losing a location or a license after missing a critical deadline, succumbing to landlord overcharges, paying late fees on permits and tax bills, and disrupting their organization’s regular duties when it’s time to prepare ASC 842 schedules.
By taking these steps, we estimate that for every 50 locations added, operators can avoid hiring one additional employee to handle lease administration tasks in-house or recover multiple employee hours if lease management is spread across departments.
Effective lease management gives you back your time, money, and peace of mind by coming alongside your business, organizing the complicated network of lease administration-related tasks, and integrating your multi-department lease management team. If you’d like to hear how Property Works can lay a foundation for centralized and efficient lease management, then let’s schedule a demo now to see our software/services in action!