Workflow — Lease Abstraction

Lease abstraction in hours, not weeks.

CRE leases, amendments, and side letters — every standard field extracted, validated, and indexed directly into MRI, Yardi, VTS, or ProLease. Replaces offshore abstractors at a fraction of the per-lease cost.

Take the AI Assessment Get a Per-Lease ROI Model

$75–$300

Per lease at the offshore abstractor

80–150

Standard fields per lease abstract

60–85%

Volume that comes off the BPO line after AI cutover

What This Replaces

The Offshore Abstractor Indexing Your Rent Roll Field-by-Field

The work the offshore abstractor does on every lease — and the cost of leaving it there.

The labor

Lease abstraction today moves through offshore abstractors at firms like KMK Consulting, Datasite, RealFoundations, MRI's offshore arm, and adjacent ALSPs. Per-lease cost runs $75–$300 depending on length, complexity, and whether amendments and side letters are in scope. A 500-lease portfolio refresh on acquisition diligence routinely runs into six figures.

The cycle time

Turnaround of 5–15 business days per lease is the norm at offshore abstraction shops, with backlogs that grow during acquisition diligence and year-end portfolio refreshes. Every week a lease sits in a queue is a week the asset-management team can't run accurate rent-roll forecasts, the underwriter doesn't know about a kick-out clause, and the operator misses a renewal-option exercise window.

The Workflow

Input · Analysis · Output

What goes in, what we do to it, and what shows up in your system of record.

Input

Lease documents

Original commercial lease (80–300 pages typical)
Amendments, modifications, and side letters
Estoppel certificates and SNDAs
Letters of intent and term sheets
Tenant work letters and exhibits
Guarantees and assumption agreements
Mixed-quality scans and recorded copies

Analysis

Extract 80–150 standard fields

Rent schedule, escalations, free-rent periods
CAM, tax, and insurance pass-throughs (gross-up provisions)
Options to renew, expansion rights, ROFOs and ROFRs
Co-tenancy, exclusives, and continuous-operation clauses
Assignment, subletting, and change-of-control restrictions
Percentage rent and breakpoint calculations
Kick-out rights, termination options, and casualty provisions

Output

Abstract into the SoR

MRI Software (REST API and import format)
Yardi Voyager / Breeze (web services and YSI imports)
VTS (Asset and Lease APIs)
ProLease (import schema)
Rent roll export ready for asset management
Critical-date alerts queued (renewals, options, kick-outs)
Field-level audit trail per lease

Side by Side

Lease Abstraction Today vs. With Last Rev

The numbers that matter: cycle time, per-lease cost, accuracy, and audit posture.

Dimension	Offshore Abstraction BPO	Last Rev Lease Abstraction
Cycle time, lease to indexed abstract	5–15 business days per lease	15–60 minutes per lease
Per-lease unit cost	$75–$300 fully loaded	Per-lease, benchmarked at 30–50% of BPO unit cost
Surge capacity (acquisition diligence)	Add headcount, queue grows, deal slips	Elastic by design — no headcount ramp
Audit log per lease	Abstractor notes, no field-level lineage	Source page + clause citation + model version + confidence per field
Amendment and side-letter handling	Often summarized at the end of the abstract	Threaded by clause — amendments override original on the same field
System of record integration	Excel deliverable, manual re-keying into MRI / Yardi / VTS	Direct via documented MRI / Yardi / VTS / ProLease APIs
Renegotiation leverage at next BPO renewal	None — you're locked in	60–85% of abstraction volume off the contract

How It Works

From Lease Document to Indexed Rent Roll

Five steps. Every one logged. Every one reversible if your confidence threshold isn't met.

Submission Lands

Lease PDFs, amendments, side letters, estoppels, SNDAs — from your data room (Intralinks, Datasite, SharePoint, Box) or directly from outside counsel. We accept the channel and the format your team already collects.

Extraction & Classification

Every one of the 80–150 standard abstraction fields extracted from the original lease, with the source clause cited. Amendments and side letters threaded by clause so the most recent governing language wins on each field.

Validation Against Your Abstract Template

Match each extracted field against your firm's or owner's abstract template — the field list, formatting conventions, and lookup taxonomies you already use. Anything below your confidence threshold per field is routed to a human exception queue — your call which queue, ours or yours.

Push to System of Record

Structured abstract delivered into MRI, Yardi Voyager / Breeze, VTS, or ProLease via the documented integration. Critical-date alerts queued (renewals, options, kick-outs). Rent roll export ready for asset management.

Audit Log Persisted

Every extracted field, validation outcome, and amendment override logged with the source page, clause citation, model version, prompt, and confidence score. Discovery-ready, lender-due-diligence-ready, and yours.

Compliance & Defensibility

Built to Meet the Quality Bar Asset Management and Diligence Already Run On

ASC 842 / IFRS 16 lease accounting fields

Standard accounting-grade fields (commencement, term, payment schedule, options reasonably certain) extracted with the source clause cited, ready for the lease-accounting team to consume without re-keying.

Amendment threading and overrides

Amendments and side letters thread to the original lease at the clause level. The abstract reflects the most recent governing language on each field, with the override chain visible in the audit log.

Lender and acquisition diligence posture

Field-level audit trail produces a chain of custody for every abstracted clause. Acquisition lender or buyer-side counsel can validate any field back to the page and clause in the original lease — no abstractor reconstruction.

Data residency & confidentiality

Lease pricing, tenant identities, and side-letter terms are confidential. Deployable in your VPC or our SOC 2 environment. Encryption in transit and at rest; retention policies set against your portfolio and engagement structure.

Common Questions

What CRE Owners, Operators & Law Firms Ask About Lease Abstraction

MRI, Yardi, and VTS are the systems of record — they store the abstract once it's been built. Most still rely on the customer or an outsourced abstractor to do the extraction. The competitor on this page is the offshore abstraction line on your operating budget — typically firms like KMK Consulting, Datasite, RealFoundations, or MRI's own offshore arm running $75–$300 per lease. We undercut that labor cost, integrate directly into your existing MRI / Yardi / VTS / ProLease deployment, and deliver structured abstract data into the system of record.

Most owners and firms keep the contract in place during pilot and early production — we route exceptions to it. Volume to the BPO drops 60–85% on lease abstraction once cutover completes. You renegotiate at the next renewal from a much better position, or shift the contract to higher-complexity work (amendment-heavy ground leases, joint-venture documents) that AI workflows take longer to absorb.

Our pilot success threshold is structured-field extraction accuracy at parity with or above your incumbent BPO, measured on the same shadow-data sample of leases. Anything below your defined confidence threshold per field is routed to a human exception queue — your call which queue, ours or yours. Net throughput goes up because high-confidence leases stop sitting in a 5–15 day queue waiting on the next shift.

Amendments and side letters are threaded to the original lease at the clause level. On any field where an amendment overrides the original, the abstract reflects the most recent governing language — and the override chain is visible in the audit log so a reviewer can trace what was overridden, when, and by which document. We don't make the legal interpretation when conflicts are ambiguous — we tag the field with the indicators and source evidence so your team makes the call on a richer file than they get from offshore intake today.

Yes — through the documented integration surface each platform supports. MRI via its REST API and import format; Yardi via Voyager and Breeze web services and YSI imports; VTS via the Asset and Lease APIs; ProLease via its import schema. Your IT team reviews and approves a service account, and we connect through the documented integration. We do not require platform-side custom development.

Yes. The 80–150 fields are a baseline; your abstract template overrides which fields are required, what the field labels are, what lookup values are valid, and how amendments roll up. We onboard your template during week 1 and validate against it through the pilot.

Lease-abstraction pilots typically run 6–8 weeks: 1–2 weeks of integration and template mapping with your asset-management or paralegal team, 4 weeks of shadow-mode running on real leases with no system-of-record writes, 1–2 weeks of supervised cutover on a constrained scope (one asset class, one region, one fund). Production rollout is staged after the pilot meets your accuracy and SLA bar.

We benchmark against your current per-lease abstraction unit cost — typically $75–$300. Our target is 30–50% of that per-lease cost at higher accuracy and faster cycle time. Pricing structures around volume tiers and outcome SLAs, not hourly billable rates.

Two Ways to Start

Take the AI assessment for a structured read on lease-abstraction feasibility in your portfolio. Or talk to us if you already know offshore abstraction is your highest CRE labor line.

Self-serve · 8 minutes

Take the AI Assessment

A short structured assessment that maps your portfolio size, current abstraction unit cost, and asset-management system to AI feasibility and ROI. Tailored read in your inbox.

Talk to a specialist

Get a Per-Lease ROI Model

Send us your portfolio size, current abstraction contract, and target system of record (MRI, Yardi, VTS, ProLease). We'll come back with a per-lease unit-cost comparison and a 6–8 week pilot plan in 5 business days.

Other Workflows

More Legal Workflows We Replace

The same approach, applied to the other document-heavy labor lines on your legal-ops or ALSP budget.

Contract Review

Third-party paper reviewed against your playbook — clauses extracted, deviations flagged, redlines drafted into iManage or NetDocuments.

M&A Due Diligence Review

Data-room contracts triaged for change-of-control, MAC/MAE, and indemnification — issues list into Intralinks or Datasite in days, not weeks.

Covenant Review

Credit agreements abstracted for financial covenants, baskets, EBITDA add-backs, and reporting requirements — into your compliance system.

eDiscovery First-Pass

Responsiveness, privilege, and hot-doc tagging across 200K–5M documents in Relativity, Reveal, or Everlaw.