| Leases are the lifeblood of any property management company as they contain information that is used for rent collection, asset management and valuation activities. An owner needs to deal with leases in two scenarios; when it grants a lease to a tenant in a building it already owns or when it acquires a new building that is subject to one or more existing leases. In both cases, lawyers will prepare a report on each lease.
As it stands, the production of a lease is convoluted and can be prone to error.
Does this sound a familiar process?
The lawyers will create and author a lease from a standard template and incorporate the negotiated amendments. Once finished the lawyer then delivers the lease to the client.
A property manager will review it and complete an in-house pro-forma with accompanying references. Then it’s handed over to the administration department, who check the references and re-key the pro-forma into the PMS. The administration department then uses the PMS to generate a report which is given back to the property manager to check that all is correct. If it is not, the report is then amended manually by the manger and given back to administration. Eventually, the report is ready to go live into the PMS and the standard lease management process commences.
Some investment managers have already adopted a simplified process whereby the fund managers receive the lease summary from the lawyers and re-key the information themselves into the PMS. While this does reduce the internal iterations, it is an expensive use of a fund manager’s time,
Either way, this is an arduous and painstaking process.
Exploiting the PISCES Lease Delivery e-Standard
PISCES have published an electronic data exchange schema, which enables the data contained within the lease to be XML codified in a standard way. This schema makes it possible for a lawyer to provide a PISCES standard compliant description of a lease report, incorporating approximately 750 data items, which could be theoretically imported directly into the PMS.
New Lease Summary form developed by Calvis
- Adobe LiveCycle Designer v8
- Adobe Reader v8 (v7 sufficient)
Now change the process
- Lease abstract form is completed using the free Adobe Reader
- No additional software is required, so almost everyone already has what they need
- The form dynamically adjusts to only show the fields that need to be completed
- This makes it much easier to complete because professionals don’t need to worry about whether a field applies – if it is there, it needs a response
- The form can capture complex data in easy to use forms with the minimum of typing
- The forms dynamically expand so that there are no scroll bars that might hide important details – which means you can print the document as a complete record
- When the form is completed, it can simply be submitted by e-mail at the click of a button
- This e-mails either just the data or the whole form with the data embedded to a chosen recipient
- Alternatively, the data can be sent directly to a system
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