The benefits of automating your lease flow process

In the real estate industry, time is a valuable commodity. How much time are you spending processing and drafting your lease forms? Have you asked yourself, is there a faster way to manage that process, including eliminating the typical leasing roadblocks and bottlenecks? Recently, MRI Software sat down with Gabriel Safar, CEO of LeasePilot, to find the answers to these questions and more.

What’s the greatest inefficiency in today’s lease contracting process?

Finding time. Not in the proverbial sense of, “Oh I’m just so busy I wish I could find more time in the day.” But in the literal sense. Call up any real estate attorney and ask for three hours of her time to draw up a lease. “Sure,” she’ll say, “I’ll have time to get to it…two weeks from today.”

While a talented lawyer’s time might cost a few thousand dollars, the legal fees are trivial compared to the cost of the days spent waiting for the lawyer to find the time to draft/review/change a lease. Multiply the delay by the number of lease iterations requiring legal expertise during the negotiation process, and it quickly becomes apparent just how expensive and inefficient the lease drafting process is.

Lease drafting velocity can be highly erratic. How does LeasePilot help address this?

The erratic nature of the leasing process is largely due to the asynchronous workflow caused by an inability to coordinate the schedules of the many stakeholders involved. LeasePilot’s automated lease drafting software eliminates these bottlenecks in a number of ways.

First, the time spent compiling the initial lease draft is dramatically reduced. In many cases, the LOI and/or the initial draft can be generated by a broker or admin. Since LeasePilot integrates with most enterprise-level CRM and asset management platforms, property and tenant data can be pulled directly from an existing database and automatically injected into the lease draft, eliminating the risk of errors caused by re-keying data.

With the busywork now eliminated by LeasePilot’s automation tools, lawyers, brokers, and others can now spend their time on things that software can’t do: negotiations, drafting custom deal terms, and generally focusing on the more abstract processes involved in leasing.

Which positions and roles within a company should know about LeasePilot?

Right now, day-to-day users of LeasePilot software are primarily in-house legal teams—lawyers, general counsel, paralegals, admins—but that’s more the result of organizational and industry inertia than anything else.

Step back for a moment and consider: what is a lease? Not in an abstract sense, but in a literal one. Most people would call it a document, but that still attributes a level of abstraction to what a lease really is. In the most literal sense, a lease is just a database of information. The document is a formal compilation and presentation of that database.

From this perspective, the positions and roles within a company that should know about LeasePilot extend far beyond the legal team. Any person or group that refers to or references information contained in a lease should know about LeasePilot.

Here’s a perfect real-world example of what we mean:

A few months ago, our team was exhibiting at an ICSC conference when a handful of folks from the property finance group at a large owner/operator stopped by our booth to talk to us. They heard our pitch and were really excited about the possibility of using LeasePilot to automate the tedious process of loading lease data into their ERP system. I asked what company they were from, and as it turned out, their company was already a LeasePilot customer. They were stunned.

“You’re joking!” They said, “You mean to tell us we’ve been spending more than three hours per lease manually entering data into our financial database when all of that could have been automated?!”

That’s a classic example of organizational “siloing,” and one that could have been avoided if people outside the legal department knew about LeasePilot and its broader applications. While the daily users of the software are mostly in legal, it’s hugely important that the entire organization knows about what LeasePilot is and what it does.

To learn more about automating your lease flow process, visit LeasePilot’s website and request a demo today.