Rebuilding an annual operating expense reconciliation from the lease
One general ledger, a dozen rule sets. Each lease decides which expense pools the tenant sees, whether a base year comes off first, whether variable costs are grossed up to an occupancy assumption, and how a cap on controllable expenses carries forward into the next year. The arithmetic is dull. The inputs are not, since the same repair line is recoverable under one lease and capital under the next. Statements go out annually, so an error survives a full cycle before a tenant with audit rights finds it and asks for the backup.
A brokerage runs on dates that were calculated by a person reading a contract, and on leads that arrive in a different shape from every portal.
The listing data is already structured. It lives in the MLS, and since RETS was retired the modern way to reach it is the RESO Web API, which returns OData against the RESO Data Dictionary. Almost nothing else in the transaction is structured. The purchase agreement arrives as a signed PDF that was structured data inside the forms platform ten minutes earlier and got flattened on the way out.
- Yardi Breeze
- QuickBooks Online
- Excel
When this is the wrong thing to build
Pick something else if the leases are absolute net with nothing shared worth reconciling, or the asset is single tenant. It is also the wrong first project where expense pools were never mapped to general ledger accounts, because that mapping is the actual work and it is a project by itself.
The constraint that shapes it
Negotiating, advising on price or terms, and soliciting are licensed activities performed under a supervising broker. More on how this sector works.
Two sources of truth. One queue of the rows that do not line up. Read what this shape is, or start from one of these.
- Widening a conflicts search past exact spelling
- Rebuilding a billable day from the trail the systems already keep
- Assembling the monthly three way trust reconciliation packet
- Matching refrigerant bought against refrigerant put into equipment
- Finding the parts the truck says it still has
- Joining one client across the ledger and the tax file
- How do I gross up operating expenses for a partly leased building?
- How does a cap on controllable expenses carry forward between years?
- What backup can a tenant demand in a CAM audit?
- Why does the base year change what a tenant owes on reconciliation?
- How do I build CAM statements when every lease excludes something different?
Back to real estate, or see how this is priced and scoped.