For as long as commercial leases have existed, lease administration in real estate has been a manual, tedious process. Since the days of typewriters and carbon copies, administrators have been burdened with digging through cumbersome paper files and manually extracting critical lease details into spreadsheets. And as portfolios have grown over the decades, so too have the hours wasted on managing client requests, tracking options, billing tenants, and reporting on these disjointed lease fragments scattered across file folders and Excel sheets.
Even today, many property management groups continue slogging through 20th century lease administration workflows, relying on small armies of administrators to comb through printed leases to capture basic terms like commencement dates, base rents, escalations, operating expenses, and expiration periods. These details get typed into Excel templates that form makeshift lease databases used for everything from accounting to budget forecasting and lease compliance reporting.
It’s an incredibly tedious process, with average 20-60 page office leases taking 30-90 minutes each for an administrator to accurately review and abstract salient data points—and that’s after the contracts have been successfully retrieved from storage boxes and file cabinets! Benchmarking indicates even a moderately sized portfolio of 100 leases can consume 4,000 to 6,000 labor hours per year on manual data extraction alone.
At $25 to $40 per hour for specialized lease abstraction staff, large real estate owners and investment firms are spending upwards of $100,000 to $250,000 annually on what equates to monotonous data entry. But direct wage costs represent merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to lost productivity from archaic lease administration approaches in modern commercial real estate.
The True Costs of Manual Systems In fact, manually extracting lease data from printed contracts and housing it in scattered Excel spreadsheets creates tremendous operational friction, introducing risks and opportunity costs across the entire lease lifecycle:
Onboarding New Leases
Critical details on new acquisitions get trapped in boxes, delaying deals from being loaded into central property management systems to maximize revenue.
Ongoing Administration
Accessing key lease details requires digging through filing cabinets or disjointed trackers, draining productivity around billing, forecasting, compliance reporting and more.
Customer service teams spend countless hours fielding redundant queries due to lack of self-serve lease data access for tenants and internal stakeholders.
Renewals and Reletting
No visibility into past licenses, options, memorandums, and standing requests complicates reletting negotiations and renewal forecasting.
Ultimately these productivity pitfalls stemming from lease administration bottlenecks create tremendous opportunity costs. Critical business decisions get made based on incomplete data and assumptions, while overburdened administrators spend more time struggling with files and spreadsheets than driving strategic initiatives to improve tenant experience.
Until now, outsourcing firms acted as temporary fixes, merely shifting manual work outside real estate firms without digitizing the core processes. Fortunately, the recent advent of intelligent document processing (IDP) finally provides the capabilities needed to truly transform legacy approaches with hyperautomation technologies.
It provides the missing link needed to automate the previously manual, tedious and error-prone processes underlying lease administration across real estate portfolios.
Our AI-first Hyperautomation platform can instantly:
- Ingest printed or scanned lease PDF documents of any length
- Identify all salient data fields needed for central lease databases
- Extract details like commencement dates and base rental rates with over 99% accuracy
- Export structured data to integrate directly into accounting, CRM, and property management systems
- Digitize entire lease documents for quick full-text search across portfolios
The Power to Transform Workflows Unlike simple task-based automation, intelligent lease abstraction provides end-to-end hyperautomation that completely transforms legacy real estate office processes. Let’s examine key operational enhancements across the lease lifecycle:
Onboarding New Leases With AI-powered data extraction, new printed leases can be ingested, digitized and loaded into central systems within minutes—accelerating acquisitions to maximize net operating income.
Ongoing Administration Abstracted lease data fuels 360-degree visibility and insights into options, escalations, outgoings, and obligations across entire portfolios through analytics and reporting. Lease queries get answered in seconds rather than hours.
Renewals and Reletting Commercial managers gain instant visibility into past licenses, amendments, memorandums, and standing tenant requests as leases approach renewals or re-leasing events – minimizing risk and uncertainty around forecasting.
The Bottom-Line Business Case Transitioning from archaic Excel and paperwork lease administration approaches to true hyperautomation delivers immense impact reflected across key CRE metrics:
- 90% fewer administrative hours spent on manual data entry and abstraction
- 97% faster turnaround on lease queries from tenants and internal stakeholders
- Millions in previously leaked revenue recouped through better lease data visibility and reporting
- 4X faster onboarding for newly acquired properties to maximize NOI
With administrators focused on strategic planning rather than spreadsheets, and databases unified with digitized lease contracts for the first time, commercial real estate groups gain tools to dramatically enhance tenant lifetime value through personalized servicers, amenity upgrades, and savvy renewals.
The Time for Change is Now Incremental fixes will no longer cut it for lease administration workflows demanding agility, efficiency and analytics in commercial real estate. True transformation can only come through wholesale hyperautomation powered by technologies like intelligent document processing. By escaping the manual lease nightmare, property managers secure mission-critical productivity, risk mitigation and profit potential for years to come. The time for change through AI is now.
