In today’s sophisticated commercial real estate market, accurate lease data is critical to ensuring you’re maximizing revenue potential and managing assets as efficiently as possible.

Organizations focused on the efficient administration of Real Estate are often confronted with issues around the management of lease data. This is because different groups within the organization have vastly different needs when it comes to how they need to “consume” leasing data.

Implementing the 5 Steps outlined in this article can significantly improve the performance of all the teams responsible of the administration and management of a company’s Real Estate Assets.

Standardize Lease Data and Related Templates: Although many organizations feel that they have this, in our experience, most truly do not. For instance, virtually all companies have a set of templates created by multiple departments for their own consumption.

However, it is extremely rare to find a set of standards around how to abstract the data. Therefore, Lease Administration will abstract the same data differently than Property Management, which will be entirely different than Legal.

What’s been missing is an agreement between departments on how to interpret different sections of the lease and how to provide cogent abstract data for each of those sections for each department.

A better option would be to create an “Abstraction Scope” document that supports all departments that “consume” leasing data. There would be clear definitions of what and how lease data needs to be abstracted and can be developed and enhanced over time.

Centralize Lease Data Collection and Management: Many organizations struggle with the Centralization/Decentralization of administrative activities. The debate about which model works best is driven by different cost models. In some instances, it is assumed that field offices know the most about the property and have the “slack resources” (like Property Manager time) to absorb the Lease Data Abstraction activity.

However, most organizations don’t create ongoing training and inter-departmental communications plans that allow this model to work efficiently over time. Invariably, there will be turnover with no clear definition of abstraction requirements; data is inconsistent and it’s difficult to create insightful reports.

Because of the training costs involved with maintaining consistent, high-quality abstraction standards, a centralized approach charged with providing service to all lease data consumers will deliver better lease data which, in turn, will deliver better management results and far fewer errors.

Enhance Lease Data for Insightful Reporting: Administering Real Estate is a complex business. There are many different activities associated with properties, and a whole host of different property types.

One of the most useful things your organization can do is provide consumers of lease data with the ability to view the data multiple different ways. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to “tag” property and lease data with attributes. This makes it possible to create reports with a range of different views.

For instance, you may be interested in viewing different geographical groupings, or different brands, or types of property collectively. By having a rich set of “tags” you can create reports that provide unique insights into different aspects of your real estate portfolio.

Make Group Specific Abstracts available to all Groups: The key to efficiency is to have accurate data delivered to decision makers. Once you have accurate data and robust metadata you can begin creating dashboards and metrics that provide granular insights into your real estate portfolio.

Things like understanding your tenant distribution and related risks are all within reach once you’ve spent the time and effort to assemble and maintain your Lease Data.

When your Groups are all accessing accurate data, magical things will begin to occur. Missed options or other critical dates become a thing of the past. Expense recovery becomes faster and more accurate, taxes get optimized by taking advantage of available discounts and billing of tenants the day a tax bill is received. All of this is possible and more, once you’ve tackled the problems associated with inaccurate and inconsistent lease data.

Assign Ownership of Lease Data to one Group: No matter how your company is organized, there needs to be one group that is charged with the ownership of Lease Data. In most instances, the ownership of data only goes as far as the responsibility of the department.

Lease Administration abstracts data that fits its mission, but not in a form that supports Property Management or Asset Management. Property Management performs its own separate abstracts, but these are not maintained as lease amendments are negotiated. Legal performs its own abstraction as well.

In the vast majority of organizations that manage large portfolios of real estate, Leases will be abstracted multiple times by a range of different people all supporting the narrow objectives of their department. This is costly and inefficient and creates pools of contradictory data within the organization.

To eliminate this, ownership of Lease Data must be assigned to one group. This group must use a Lease Data Abstraction Scope document to document the needs of each consumer of lease data and maintain this Scope Document as a living reference in support of abstraction activities.

In this way management can be assured of streamlined and consistent abstract data for all the systems that support the day to day administration and management of their portfolios.

To learn more about how NTrust makes these practices come to life for your company, write or call NTrust: [email protected] or call 562-207-1610.