Are you looking to hire a lease administrator? Lease administration is a critical function of lease portfolio management, so hiring a lease administrator to help you stay on top of the leases in your portfolio is a major decision and certainly one which you want to get right. This blog discusses a few key questions you should ask your lease administrator before you trust them with your leases.
Experience
When interviewing a prospective lease administrator, pay attention to their lease administration experience. Apart from the obvious, such as the number of year have they been into this service line, find out what kind of leases have they worked on. For example, if you are a retail business, then it is better to hire someone who has had experience in retail lease administration.
Another aspect to check in terms of experience is their knowledge of your lease administration platform. Have they worked on the lease administration software that you are using? While it may not be difficult to adapt to a new lease administration software, hiring someone who has already worked on your lease administration software platform and has experience dealing with leases from your industry vertical will drastically cut down the training time and give you better ROI on your new hire.
Scope of work that they have handled before
The next step is to understand what is/has been their scope of work in terms of lease administration. Lease administration is a very broad bucket and includes various lease support services such as CAM audit and reconciliation, notice processing, critical date monitoring, liasoning with landlord, payment processing, etc. (You can learn more about it here) You want to make sure that your lease administrator has the experience handling all of these tasks.
References
Ask your prospective lease administrators to furnish you with client testimonials and referrals. Make sure they are able to give you client names and contact information, so you can verify if the glowing client testimonials they provide are authentic. It is even better if the organizations/clients they have worked with are from your industry vertical.
What about lease abstraction?
While lease administrators usually work with lease abstracts or leases that have already been abstracted, it is good to know if your lease administrator has the skillset necessary to abstract leases. There always exists the possibility of mergers, acquisitions, renewals, amendments and addendums. Having a lease administrator who has strong language and lease interpretation skills will be helpful as they will be able to abstract your leases or update it accurately.
Rebolease.com, powered by RE BackOffice, Inc., is a premier provider of lease abstraction, administration, audit and accounting services. Headquartered in Pittsburgh, PA, we are a global boutique firm, providing high-quality services to top-tier clients across industry verticals, covering every type of lease and on any lease platform. We are proud to be a trusted partner, for 15+ years, to leading retailers, REITs, property owners/managers, and corporate accounts seeking a strategic advantage. All client projects are performed in-house.