Resolving rental liabilities with JLL tech

Challenge

As we stepped into a new facilities management contract with a government client, we got to work on our commitments to reduce financial risk and achieve cost savings across our client’s real estate portfolio.

But an audit of our client’s 114 lease contracts revealed missing information due to the way our client’s data had been previously managed, and overdue financial obligations as a result.

Approach

We needed a quick and thorough way to understand the extent of the missing data and address the overdue payments. So, as a first step, we imported the existing data into the JLL platform Portfolio, a lease administration database used to store documents and information taken from leases.

We had agreed with our client the scope of the information we would capture, including whether properties were under direct lease assignment or subleased, the cost of repayments, critical dates, and landlord and tenant obligations.

We were able to ascertain that the missing data included 248 critical events, which are anything that can impact the financial capacity of the client, such as payment notice dates; 19 outgoing budgets, which are liabilities written into lease agreements, such as building expenses; and seven rent review letters.

Portfolio also flagged payments that were overdue, and it had transpired that our client was liable for $480,000 in additional rental repayments. One of the main reasons for this was that consumer price index increases had not been recorded or actioned. Our client had accumulated debts to several landlords as a result.

Result

Getting our client’s data in order and capturing it in our technology platform Portfolio, means that financial oversights are very unlikely to reoccur.

We overlayed Portfolio with a data governance tool called Lighthouse, which establishes ‘rules’ around the data, sending alerts when the accuracy and consistency of information across Portfolio and other integrated applications are compromised.