What is a Lease Abstract in Commercial Real Estate (CRE)?

Commercial lease agreements are typically 20-50 pages long. Usually, it takes 4-8 hours to manually summarize one commercial lease agreement into an abstract of 2-5 pages. Technically, that’s one working day that could have been spent on more high-value tasks. This is where lease abstracts come in.

What is a Lease Abstract?

A lease abstract is a summary of a commercial lease agreement that highlights the most important legal, financial, and business details to provide a quick and easy-to-understand overview of the lease agreement.

A lease abstract typically includes:

• Parties: information about the tenant (full name, current address, rent history, financial records, background check results) and landlord or property owner (legal Identity, contact information, relevant details like ownership structure, property management company, etc.)
• Financial Terms: the primary rental amount that includes base rent plus any additional costs (e.g., utilities, property taxes, common area maintenance).
• Rights and Responsibilities: details of tenant’s rights and responsibilities (terminate the lease, remodel the property, right of first refusal, etc.) and landlord’s rights and responsibilities (rent collection, property inspection, maintenance and repairs, eviction, etc.) as well as details of the process for lease renewal.
• Taxes: specifies which taxes the tenant and landlord are obligated to pay.
• Reimbursements: outlines the tenant’s responsibility for contributing to common area maintenance costs and any additional expenses the tenant is obligated to reimburse the landlord for.
• Property Details: description (physical attributes, size, layout, etc.), location (address and surrounding area information), zoning (permitted uses and restrictions).
• Title and Insurance: information about the property’s ownership and whether title insurance is provided.
• Security Deposit: amount, withholding conditions, return process.
• Important Dates: lease start and expiration dates.
• Use Clauses: the allowed business activities or types of businesses on the premises and any limitations on the use of the property.
• Termination Clauses: required notice periods for termination by either party, financial penalties associated with early termination, and specific events or conditions that could trigger lease termination.
• Parking Requirements: number of parking spaces included in the lease.
• Co-tenancy and Subleasing: possibility and conditions of co-tenancy and the tenant’s right to lease all or some of their space to another tenant.
• Estoppel: additional fees and/or fines.
• Other Critical Provisions: any additional important provisions specific to the lease agreement like insurance requirements or maintenance responsibilities.

What is Lease Abstraction?

Lease abstraction is the process of highlighting key information like terms and conditions, financial obligations, and parties’ contact information and summarizing it into a concise and structured document – lease abstract. Lease abstraction can be manual which relies on human expertise and automated, either with AI and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) the technology that allows the tool to recognize scanned and handwritten text and convert it to digital, editable one.

How to Get a Lease Abstract with OCR?

To get a lease abstract, you can use traditional OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tools like Adobe Acrobat or ABBYY FineReader. These tools scan and convert various documents, such as scanned paper documents, PDFs, or images captured by a digital camera, into editable and searchable data. They work by recognizing and extracting text from images, allowing for easier manual lease abstraction.

How Lease Abstraction Becomes Cheaper and More Efficient with AI

Modern and more advanced lease abstraction tools use a combination of several technologies, backing up OCR with NLP (Natural Language Processing) – a technology that can understand and analyze natural language and texts of different levels of difficulty. This powerful combination solves the drawbacks of traditional lease abstraction tools like struggles with complex document structures, ambiguous language, and handwritten text.

These tools, known as intelligent document processing (IDP) technology, if equipped with artificial intelligence capabilities, can handle not only residential and commercial lease agreements but also, mortgage document processing, contract analysis, and other real estate document processing.

The main competitive advantages of AI lease abstraction are saving time and costs. Initially, AI lease abstraction tools require some time and expenses to fill the database with relevant information and train the model. However, in the long run, replacing manual lease abstraction with AI-powered process pays off. Even the costs of further technical maintenance are drastically lower than paying for the whole department of specialists on lease abstraction.

Also, commercial lease agreements are full of complex legal terms that change year by year. Lease abstraction specialists need time to learn new information and look into the specifics. Traditional OCR lease abstraction software doesn’t understand the language, so there is no way to increase lease abstract accuracy or adapt it to the ever-changing real estate industry.

Meanwhile, with the AI lease abstraction tool, everything you need to do is add new entities to the database and the system will be able to understand the context. This way, no important information will be overlooked, reducing the number of errors and the necessity of manual reviewing.

AI-powered Lease Abstraction Tools can:

• Create highly accurate abstracts
• Extract key details relying on the context
• Handle complex data and terminology
• Do bulk analysis of the various document formats
• Find necessary information faster
• Answer user’s questions about the information in the document
• Sort and store documents by their type
• Automate data entry into CRM or data management systems.

Lease abstraction tools can handle bulk analysis and a big influx of different documents, and be integrated with email services, CRMs, company software, cloud storage, etc. However, to successfully implement this technology within your workflows, it’s crucial to partner with a reliable provider.

The Ascendix team managed to build a complex framework that leverages modern AI technologies for advanced real estate document processing. Our framework resolves the flaws of traditional lease abstraction tools and uses the combination of several powerful technological advancements to achieve more accurate and faster results.

The AI model of our tool has been trained on a myriad of real estate documents. With NLP powering it, our tool guarantees it will not only abstract your leases but also analyze them, summarize the information in tables, read images and handwriting, and answer your questions regarding the lease abstract.

Contract Summary AI Interface | AscendixTech

Contact us to find out how we can help you automate your lease processing workflows.

Benefits of Lease Abstraction

Easier Lease Management and Communication

The main idea of the lease abstract is to provide a concise summary of the long commercial lease agreement to understand key details, demands, expectations, rights, and obligations of the parties involved. This way interested parties can cut right to the chase without looking into routine content and quickly grasp the essential details.

Also, lease abstracts ensure better communication between property managers, landlords, and tenants. Since all parties understand their rights and responsibilities, it reduces the risk of disputes, facilitates the negotiation process, and improves relations in general. For example, lease abstract structures the financial liabilities that may be incurred in case of any errors to resolve misunderstandings as soon as possible.

Risks Mitigation

Compliance with all aspects of a lease as well as understanding the rights and responsibilities of every stakeholder reduces the possibility of costly mistakes. For example, a lease abstract helps owners avoid missing critical dates like tax payment days or insurance renewal, which can result in significant fines or property loss. If purchasing appropriate insurance is the tenant’s responsibility, the lease abstract mentions requiring tenants to provide proof of insurance.

Since the lease abstract outlines important financial and legal information, it gets easier to comply with any taxation or local laws or regulations as well. Also, lease abstraction helps identify potential risks associated with specific leases, such as early termination clauses, rent escalation clauses, or restrictive covenants, allowing landlords to mitigate those risks proactively.

Revenue Optimization

Property managers and owners can use lease abstracts to optimize the revenue of a set of properties. Having a clear understanding of lease terms, landlords can make informed decisions regarding lease renewals, rent negotiations, and property management strategies.

For example, a lease abstract lays out exactly which expenses the tenant is responsible for paying. Managers can review these expenses periodically and request reimbursements to increase cash flow. Also, the lease abstract outlines the property description that can be used to decide on further improvements to demand bigger rent next time.

Why is Ascendix a Trusted Partner in AI Proptech Development?

At Ascendix, we benefit established real estate businesses with innovative proptech solutions relying on our 16+ years of experience in proptech development. Real estate titans like JLL, Colliers, and Savills entrust us with automating their business workflows.

How can Ascendix help?

• We can tailor our robust framework for Intelligent Document Processing according to your unique business needs.
• We can consult you on business automation and AI integration.
• We can test and audit your older software to ensure it performs well and is ready to be customized with potential AI integration;

Contact us directly or book a free proptech call to learn how you can leverage our proptech development expertise.