What you ask is a lease abstract?  It’s a document that summarizes the details of a particular real estate property. The document is supposed to make it easier for a person to understand the lease contract without reading it. The lease contract can be very detailed and verbally dense, reviewing it is a time consuming and labor intensive task.

In commercial real estate, lease abstraction is an essential tool to distill specific information from a lease. What to extract from a lease and coordinating that flow of information between various teams can literally cost time and a great deal of money, which can be invested in other more productive ventures. The ease of reviewing all relevant lease information without taking the time to search and read through each page of a highly dense contract without losing needed information is essential for both real estate and law farms.  A multi-billion dollar, publicly traded real estate firm was facing an issue. How to streamline that process without the loss of accuracy of the key information.  That was Codemen’s challenge.

First, we needed to understand the importance of those first two paragraphs. This began with an intensive business analysis period. Then we developed a solution that standardizes the abstraction process through a NLP (Natural Language Processing) engine. We also used Python, C#, ReactJS, MySQL, MongoDB to make the abstraction process automated.

The process starts with the Application Users creating different customizable lease abstract templates. The actual lease can then be uploaded and the application compares it with the created template. The engine identifies changes and suggests abstracts for specific lease clauses. Because accuracy is so integral to this process, we increased it by automating a “check back” feature to individual lease clauses.

The end result was that lease abstraction, a process that could take an individual up to 2 days to convert a 150 page lease to a 1 page abstract if done manually, now takes hours only. Through the development cycle of the application, we ensured that the efficiency level of the clients’ projects was always tested to return the optimum level. Now, there is an organized workflow between the client’s three teams; the lease abstractor, lease administrator and leasing team.

We saved our client time, money and didn’t sacrifice the needed accuracy of reviewing a complex commercial leasing document.