While administrative tasks frequently get viewed as necessary evils in the conduct of business, lease administration is a different animal. When a business has an optimized administration system, it can lead to thousands or millions of dollars in operating cost savings. It can also provide the potential for better strategic control of real estate assets.

Lease audits are a necessary part of lease administration. Just as running a corporate real estate portfolio is complicated for you, running a building is complicated for your landlord. Sometimes landlords make mistakes, and frequently, those mistakes are in his favor. Auditing is the best way to ensure that you're not only paying what you should relative to your lease, but that your expenses are in-line with the market and other properties you occupy. Here are five rules to follow to make lease administration and auditing easier for you:

Lease administration is a fundamental task for corporate real estate departments. It's extremely time-consuming and requires steadfast attention to detail. While moving quickly and maintaining a high degree of accuracy are usually mutually exclusive, carefully planning lease administration the right way can help you achieve both goals at once. Here are five tips:

1. Pre-Schedule

Pre-scheduling lease administration tasks might seem like a way to consume time instead of saving it, but the opposite is the case. The more that you can put assets in place before you need them, the less time you will spend scrambling for them or for staffers to help you when a deadline is looming. This is especially important with time-consuming tasks like planning relocations or move outs.

2. Standardize

The more that you can standardize your lease administration, the more enhanced it will be. Standardizing your internal processes is relatively simple since they're under your control - it's just a matter of execution.

Standardizing your lease documents can be more challenging. Look at the relationship in size between you and your landlord. If you're a large organization with a small landlord, you will probably be in a strong position to require that your (standardized) documents be used. When your landlord is larger, you may not have that option.

Take what you can get. Even if you can only standardize 30 or 50% of your leases, it will still make administration easier. Bear in mind that when you have the same information in the same place, you're less likely to make a mistake when you look for it.

Busy? Here are even more ways to save time: 5 Awesome Time-Saving Tips for CRE Directors

3. Separate Legal and Business Terms

Whether or not you can standardize your lease documents, writing them so that the business and legal terms are separate makes them easier to work with. The more data that you can move to a "definitions" page, the easier it will be to move through that lease, pull out the information you need, and move on to your next project. If you choose to use this strategy, consider having your leases professionally abstracted as well. This will ensure that you don't lose track of any important data that gets hidden in the legal areas of the document.  Lease abstracting will save time by making your leases more accessible for new projects.

4. Computerize

Using computer software that is specially designed for lease management will save you more than enough time to make up for the learning curve associated with implementing it. A good corporate real estate management and lease administration program should offer robust critical date management capabilities as well as real estate benchmarking tools that automate the process of reporting on your portfolio's performance. When software handles tasks for you, it doesn't just save time. It also reduces the risk of simple human errors.

5. Leverage Third Parties

Lease administration isn't something that you have to do alone. While software is a virtual third party, having partners in the process can also help you to be more effective. Your corporate real estate brokerage team can't administer your leases for you, but they can serve as a partner for market research. In addition, you can off-load much of the work of handling renewal negotiations or discussions with prospective new landlords to them, saving you time and gaining you the benefit of their expertise.

When time is an issue, reach out to partners who can help make the lease administration process smoother. It is crucial to work smarter, not faster.

Whether you're working smarter, using software or letting a third party help you, lease administration shouldn't have to be a daunting task. Strategic time management can reduce your labor investment and provide rewarding results.

Here are some other great Commercial Lease Administration articles:

The Perfect Commercial Lease Administration Software

5 Features To Look For In Commercial Lease Administration Software

5 Mistakes To Avoid in Lease Administration

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