How to Find the Best Lease Administration Software for Your Needs

It’s finally happened. You’ve reached your limit. You’ve made it to the end of your rope. You’ve hit the wall. You need a strategic way to manage your leases, and you need it now! The spreadsheet you’ve been using is out of control. ASC 842/IFRS 16 compliance is knocking at your door. You missed an important option deadline. You can’t find a single document, and your boss needs income/expense reports ASAP. 

So maybe your situation isn’t that dramatic, but your commercial real estate leases are a big deal and it’s time to find a management solution that fits your needs. Ready to start searching but aren’t sure where to start? Use this article as your resource to find the best lease administration software that fits your needs.  

After you finish reading, make sure to download our Quick Guide to Lease Administration Software for even more insight into the benefits of software and best practices for software demos. 

Start Strong

Before you even start the process of looking for lease administration software, it’s important to reflect on your organization and determine if you really need lease administration software. 

Not only will these questions help you determine if you need software, they will help you identify areas of your current lease management strategy that might need some attention. 

1. Can you produce a reliable list of every location your organization leases or owns from a single data source?
   
2. Do you remember every lease expiration, termination right or option?
3. Can you retrieve any lease document, proposal, floor plan or other file for every location?
4. If asked to produce rent projections for the next month, quarter or decade, can you generate that report immediately?
5. If your real estate manager left the company today, could their replacement be in total control of managing your lease obligations from the start? 

If you answered no to any of those questions, or had trouble coming up with an answer, it’s probably time to start researching your options. But before you dive into your research, let’s define what lease administration is. 

One of our original posts on lease administration shares this definition: 

Lease Administration is the ongoing process of gathering key business and legal points from leases to ensure contract adherence (the past) and applying these data points into meaningful metrics to predict and standardize better utilization of real estate (the future). 

The end result of lease administration is total organization and accuracy. The process helps you gain an understanding of your responsibilities, ensures that you are following the rules that you are agreeing to, and allows you to see the details in a way that helps you create a plan for the future. 

Software & Lease Administration – Features to Focus On

You’ve determined you need lease administration software, but what do you even look for? What are the key elements that make up good lease administration software? 

1. An Overview of Specific Lease Points 

Lease administration software provides you with a singular platform where you can create a centralized list of all your leases so that you can easily identify and access an individual lease with the click of a button. No more stressful searches through pages and pages of a lease to find key information – everything is organized and available right when you need it. 

For example, the Quarem Vantage Lease Administration feature provides users with a lease abstract that highlights over 30 key points of a lease. In addition to inputting the facts and figures of a lease item, users have the option to insert the actual lease language from any section of a lease directly into the abstract. 

2. Income/Expense Tracking & Lease Accounting 

Lease administration software is your ticket to accurate and efficient income and expense schedules. It’s also your guide to ASC 842/IFRS 16 compliance. Look for a platform that 

• Gives you the ability to build income/expense schedules for each lease
• Guides you through the lease classification and identification process 
• Calculates ROU 
• Generates amortization tables and the corresponding journal entries
• Provides a powerful and customizable reporting feature that you can use to analyze metrics, like income/expense obligations or ASC 842 journal entry summaries.

3. Critical Date Tracking 

Managing multiple leases comes with an overload of important dates that are unique to each lease. If missed, these dates can lead to loss of time and money. Lease administration software gives you the ability to create automated email reminders tied to each lease that help you stay on top of things like renewal options, expirations or required maintenance. 

4. Contact and Document Management 

Collaboration is essential to your lease management strategy. The contacts involved are unique to each lease and start to add up even before the lease is signed. From brokers to landlords to vendors, you need a lease administration platform that gives you the ability to create detailed contact profiles for each of your connections. 

Not only do commercial leases come with a variety of contacts, they also come with a mountain of important documents. Your filing cabinet may have gone digital, but that doesn’t mean your documents are any less cluttered. It’s important to find a cloud-based lease administration solution that securely stores all of your files and supports quick exports for seamless collaboration. 

5. Personalized and Accessible Support 

The support structure behind any lease administration software should go beyond tech support tickets or training. Your software provider should be readily available for day-to-day questions and offer expert guidance when it comes to things like structuring your portfolio within the system, report generation, data entry and lease abstracting. 

At Quarem, we take a unique approach to service. We want our clients to consider us an extension of their team. When you call, the phone is answered by a member of our team at our headquarters in Houston, TX, and we are ready to assists you with anything, from developing strategy to technical support. 

Lease administration software is designed to simplify your daily processes and help you make accurate decisions about your commercial real estate, but it also takes time to find the right solution that fits best with your goals and strategy. We encourage you to download our Quick Guide to Lease Administration Software, as it goes into greater detail about the technical features to look for and the questions to ask during software demos in order to get the most out of your experience. 

Feel like you are ready to see all that the Quarem Vantage Lease Administration feature has to offer? Schedule a demo with a member of the Quarem team today.