The best software for administering your lease

Ales stenar

People laugh when I tell them the single most important tool for administering a lease is the digital calendar. This is because, before the digital calendar, everybody was limited to a twelve month calendar and if you were super organized you had a twenty-four month calendar (which got shorter every month). A lease is a ten (five or fifteen) year commitment of abstract, onetime, non recurring, relative to nothing dates. The digital calendar is the ideal tool for entering all those dates.

As soon as a lease is signed, someone with a calendar (preferably one that is passed along to successive employees) should diarize the following items:

• rental increases

• expiry dates of tenants that are occupying space that your company may have a futurefirst or second right to

• lease extension notification dates and a date one year prior to this, to discuss the best course of action

• expiry date and a date 18 months prior, to discuss a course of action

• the last date you have to review the landlord’s statement of additional rent on a yearly basis
• any future free rent periods

• the amount of your deposit, the date the deposit is returned or, when applied to the last month’s rent, the months the deposit is applied towards

For clients that have multiple leases, Colliers provides an online service that tracks all the pertinent dates, notifies any number of people, and keeps scanned copies of all the lease documents. This is an invaluable tool for lease administrators, managers, controllers, CFO’s and real estate departments.