Centralize and Optimize Retail Lease Agreements
Retail lease agreements can be tricky to deal with unless you have an integrated “retail-centric” accounting system that enables accurate, centralize methods of lease management. In addition to keeping track of rent payments and lease renewals, it’s important that your lease be approved by your attorney before committing. In this way, you have another set of eyes going over the clauses and an experienced view that allows complete optimization of your lease.
Fees Can Minimize The Benefits of Your Lease
For instance, Administrative Fees or Common Area Maintenance(CAM) fees are complex subjects for many retailers. If your store is located in a mall, CAMs usually cover the cost of maintenance and repair in the areas your customer uses outside the store. These areas may include parking lot maintenance, lighting and landscaping, sidewalks, hallways, elevators and stairwells, lobbies, and public restrooms.
Often, the fees are non-negotiable terms in your lease, but the bills for such fees should be viewable by you, the retailer. Caps on increases may be negotiable by percentage or amount. Before any negotiations, the list of what is included in the applicable CAM needs to be clearly stated as part of the contract.
Many retailers object to paying such fees because the landlord is already making a profit from the rent, and maintenance of common areas should be paid for from those profits, in their eyes. However you feel about the issue, when a retailer is dealing with lease management, the subject of Administrative Fees or CAM fees will definitely come up.
ChainDrive Can Optimize and Centralize Your Retail Lease Agreement
With ChainDrive’s sophisticated lease management tool, all the retail lease agreement can be centralized, and alerts can be put in place for renewals. Automatic payments and invoicing to the GL are easy to set up with the integrated accounting software. Optimizing is just as simple because the advanced liability reporting allows a projection up to twelve years ahead, providing time to analyze and strategize for negotiating the best lease agreements for your retail enterprise.