Budgeting for lease expenses is an important process in lease portfolio management. Leases are critical agreements that include a significant amount of expenses (if you are a tenant) attached to them. Lease budgeting is the process of budgeting for those expenses in advance, so you are not caught off-guard when it is time to make the payments. While the concept seems simple, it can get a bit overwhelming when you have a large portfolio of leases spanning across multiple locations, with each lease having different dollar amounts and payment due dates. This blog discusses some of the best practices related to lease budgeting.
What are the expense items that you want to budget for?
Start by making a list of the key lease elements you want to budget for. There are various expense items/cash flows in a lease. It all depends on the type of lease. For gross leases, you just need to budget for the lease rental as that pretty much covers everything, but for net leases, there are various items to consider. You need to identify which ones you want to budget for. Usually, CAM or common area maintenance charge is a big element, but there are others like real estate taxes, snow removal services, etc, which may have to be budgeted for as well.
How much do the items you identified typically cost?
The next step is to identify or estimate the cost of the expense items you have listed. You can arrive at a pretty accurate estimate based on the the last few year’s actual amounts spent in regard to those expense. If your lease has an annual increase percentage mentioned for any of those expenses, make sure you take the increase into amount when estimating the cost for the upcoming year. Looking at the actual lease portfolio expenses of last 3 or 5 years minimizes budget variances and helps you prepare a lease budget that’s as close to the actual expense as possible.
Check old variance reports, so you can sidestep older mistakes and oversights
You can also look at the last few year’s variance reports. Variance reports tell you the difference between your budgeted and actual cash expenses. Learning about the variances over the years and understanding why they happened will help you prepare a more accurate lease budgets.
Do your market research
Spend some time researching and looking at the financial predictions for your market. Market forecasts for your lease locations can impact your budget significantly. For example, if your market is predicted to have a lower occupancy, it may drive your pro-rata common area maintenance (CAM) charges higher. Checking out market forecasts can help you factor for such unexpected variances.
Lease budgeting is a critical task, but also time consuming and labor intensive and needs to be performed accurately every year. Consider bringing a lease administration team on board during the budget season so they can offer your lease administration team additional help. Either they can take over your lease budgeting task, or your mundane lease administration tasks so your in-house lease administrators can work on creating an accurate lease budget for the year.