Lease management involves the ongoing tracking and management of all aspects of a lease agreement and often includes the following key elements:

• Managing lease payments to ensure service and rent charges are correct and to avoid late payment fees.
• Monitoring lease terms to keep track of critical dates around break clauses and extensions, rent reviews, and lease renewals.
• Ensuring leases are accounted for in compliance with ASC 842/GASB 87
• Storing lease agreements and all documents associated with a lease in a centralized repository.
• Generating comprehensive lease reports to ensure a full audit trail, and provide better insights into lease data to make business-critical decisions.

Artificial intelligence plays a key role in enhancing the lease administration process by providing the tools to digitalize, extract, and structure data from real estate, equipment, and asset leases.

Some key examples of how AI makes an impact include:

Validates data – building out an accurate and transparent data repository of lease information, and decreasing administrative errors and potential mistakes from missing, or inaccurate data.

Automation – automating the processing of real estate and asset leases.

Assures compliance – closing information gaps that could slow down key decision makers, acquisitions, or sales, and creating audit trails to ensure data accuracy and authenticity.

Maximizes revenue – ensuring billing and contracts accurately reflect commercial agreements, and uncovering expense leakage such as rent payment and processing errors, poorly tracked improvement projects, or unrecovered security deposits.

Specialist lease management software provides a centralized platform on which to manage real estate leases and subleases, accommodate day-to-day changes, and track key dates. Examples of how software can simplify the process include:

• Intuitive user interface enables efficient and comprehensive data management.
• Automated email alerts ensures that critical lease dates are never missed
• Provides a complete picture of property and equipment leases with a single source of information.
• Integration with lease accounting tools delivers confident compliance with ASC 842 and GASB 87 standards.
• Surfaces information easily with data visualization tools, dashboards, and location mapping.
• Delivers the required transparency with reporting, audit trail capability, and access to historical lease information.

While there is a degree of overlap between these two operations, lease management focuses solely on managing and tracking the financial, legal, and administrative aspects of lease agreements, whereas property management is more wide ranging, and concentrates more on the management of physical properties and facilities including maintenance, property operations, and tenant relations.