Lease administration is a major challenge for dedicated corporate real estate departments. When you have to take care of your company's corporate real estate and you either don't have a staff or it's part of a larger group of duties, lease administration can quickly become a burden. 

Given that critical date management of important milestones like option, renewal and expiration dates is a major part of the job, the cost of a mistake could be staggering. Here are a few things that you can do to make your job easier and to reduce the risk of errors.

Delete Excel

One of the first things you'll probably hear when you start taking on lease administration tasks is to just use Excel. While deleting it might be a bit drastic, you'll experience some shortcomings when using it to take care of your portfolio:
 

1. It's a blank sheet - it will take time to come up with your own administration system. 

2. It has no intelligence - it can't track your entries for inconsistencies or errors. 

3. It's not truly multi-user - if you get help, you could end up with out-of-sync files. 

4. It's passive - Excel stores the data you give it and shows it to you when you look at it.
 

Abstract Everything

You don't have time to read leases and flip through them for reference whenever you need to look information up. Instead, create lease abstracts.These are standardized documents that have all of a lease's business points in an easy to read format. If you have the lease administration budget, consider paying an attorney or abstracting firm to do it for you. That way, you're not spending the time to do the work and if the firm makes a mistake, their errors and omissions insurance might protect you. Take the time to organize yourself with lease abstracts - you'll thank yourself later for all the critical time saved.

Use a Calendar

If you get the dates right for your company's leases, you've successfully completed half of lease administration duties. Setting a calendar reminder for every critical date - whether it's in your commercial real estate software, in the cloud, or on Outlook - will help to reduce the chance of a costly error. Your abstracts will spell out the dates so that they're easy to find, too. When you set your reminders, remember to set them far enough out that you can act on them. For example, you don't need to know that a lease is rolling tomorrow. You need to know nine to 12 months in advance so that you can formulate a strategy.

Get Software

If you have a team of assistants to track your dates and portfolio and analyze your leases and markets for you, you don't need software. Since you're on your own for lease administration, software can automate some of these tasks for you. Without it, you're stuck managing the bare minimum - paying rents, reconciling CAMs and handling expiring spaces. 

Software takes all of your data and gives you reports that you can use to understand which of your spaces are performing and which aren't. In a perfect world, the information it provides will save your company an indispensable amount of money and time. Some software packages also integrate with your calendar, saving you from entering dates.

Get Help

Just because you don't have a lease administration staff doesn't mean that you can't get help. A corporate services real estate broker can help you manage your portfolio and provide the market intelligence that you need to make good decisions.

See what our CRE software can do for your lease administration duties.  Sign up for a free demo: