Lease administration: The key to uncovering hidden costs in your leases

For a corporate occupier, managing the complex leases within the organization’s property portfolio is a tedious endeavor, especially given how difficult it can be to ascertain the true monetary value of a lease.

When it comes to managing a large portfolio of complicated leases, human error is one of the biggest risks your organization faces as the simplest of mistakes could cost a lot of money. At MRI Software, our team of lease administration experts interact with clients daily to catch many of these errors before they happen.

Here are three key areas in which common slip ups could have resulted in real estate occupiers losing out on big money.

Unreliable lease abstraction

It’s not uncommon for important data points to get lost in the time-consuming process of manually pulling information from your leases and contracts. Collecting all of the data, provisions, and terms from your leases – and knowing where that information can be found quickly – is a top way to drive cost savings. Utilizing “deep lease data” can benefit your business by bringing to light automatic renewal provisions, security deposit billings, and improvement allowances.

With inefficient lease abstraction, automatic renewal provisions in leases and contracts can sometimes go unnoticed, especially if the lease has been added to your portfolio through a large acquisition. If left undiscovered, these renewal provisions can cost your organization a whole 12 months’ worth of rent. In large acquisitions like this, you could also be losing out on security deposits that your accounting department won’t have an accrual for, meaning the deposit will be paid out. With a more efficient review of these leases and through cross-referencing with legal documents, these deposits could be accounted for.

Poorly tracked improvement projects

Major facilities management projects that involve multiple departments (and, as such, multiple points of contact) could also be exposing your organization to financial losses. If the improvement allowances tied to these projects aren’t properly tracked, it could end up costing millions of dollars in delay costs and funds not collected from landlords.

Rent payment and processing errors

There are plenty of steps in the rent payment and collection process that could be exposing your organization to financial risk. Whether due to technical errors, oversights, or landlords in accidental misalignment with their leases, money can easily fall through the cracks, and considering that rent serves as the largest dollar spend in most organizations, that money can add up fast.

One step of the rent collection process where errors can occur is in the application of late fees. Sometimes, late fees are applied when they’re not supposed to be – it’s even possible that a landlord might have set their system to charge rent as late until marked otherwise. If rent is paid on time and charged with late fees anyway, that could end up costing your organization thousands. Similar errors can occur in the simple act of rent payment. If a payment isn’t applied to the corresponding account in a timely manner, there’s a risk that the money could get lost in a landlord’s bank account.

Catch mistakes before they impact your business

Having the right technology and expert advice to manage your leases can save your organization thousands of dollars. Whether it’s through AI-powered lease abstraction tools that pull critical terms and key data out of your leases or through a committed team of experts that can catch errors in rent payment processes through monthly reconciliation, MRI Software’s lease administration solutions can enable you to tap into the full potential of your data, drive cost savings, and simplify your leases. Learn more about how much your leases could be costing your organization.