For lease administration, property accounting, and finance teams
Every reconciliation checked against the lease that governs it, down to the landlord's ledger.
Why it matters
CAM is where the largest billing errors hide, and where the window to object closes fastest.
1.2B
sqft of enterprise operations run on REAL
8M+
tasks completed across enterprise portfolios
1.2%
of CAM spend recovered
Capital work billed as maintenance, caps quietly exceeded, leasing costs buried in general and administrative, a management fee at the wrong rate. Each one named with the clause that rules it out.
Disallowed expense · Capital repair
§7.4(c) excludes capital items from CAM pool
Cap exceeded · Controllable expenses
5% cap · invoiced at 8.4%
Leasing costs billed as G&A
§7.4(f) excludes tenant procurement costs
Management fee · rate above lease
§7.6 · 4% permitted · 5% charged
Portfolio total this cycle: $412,000 recoverable
A summary review catches arithmetic. Reading the ledger catches what was actually billed and how it was categorised. When the landlord's detail is provided under your audit rights, REAL reconciles every line of it.
Statement pool
Ledger detail reconciled
GL 6100–6480 · 1,412 line items
Services not benefiting your premises
parking deck sealing · separate parcel
Denominator understated
Floors 4–5 offline · GLA not adjusted
An expense that jumps without a scope change is where a disallowed cost usually enters the pool. REAL holds every reconciliation against the years before it across your whole portfolio.
Landscaping · +34%
no scope change on record
Snow removal · +6%
Security · +71%
new line item · not in prior pool
Utilities · +4%
Each lease sets its own objection window, lookback period, and records access. REAL reads those terms first, so a claim is built inside the rights you hold rather than outside them.
Objection period
§7.8 · 28 days remaining
Lookback permitted
§7.9
Records access
§7.9(b)
Claim value at risk
Not a note saying something looks wrong. The charge, the clause it violates, the amount, and the supporting statement and ledger references assembled. Your team reviews and sends.
Charge
Clause
capital items excluded
Amount
Support
GL 6420 p.4
| A contingency lease audit | With REAL | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Selected leases, chosen for likely yield | Every lease, every reconciliation |
| Timing | An engagement, run when commissioned | Continuous, every cycle |
| What you keep | Recovery net of the firm's share | All of it |
| Turnaround | Months, including negotiation | Findings as each statement arrives |
| Clean statements | Not reviewed | Reviewed and confirmed clean |
| What you own after | A report | Abstracted lease terms that keep working |
Firms that audit on contingency take a share of what they find, which means they go where the yield is and skip the rest. REAL runs the whole portfolio every cycle. Teams often keep both, using REAL for coverage and a firm for a small number of genuinely contested disputes.
A flagged overcharge is an accounting event. The accrual books with the clause reference attached, so the close and the recovery file tell the same story.
Recovery accrued · Michigan Ave → Lease Accounting
Variance booked with clause reference
The REAL Suite
Each REAL agent is an expert in its domain, built to share context and act on what the others know. The more agents work in your portfolio, the more complete each one’s view of it becomes, and the stronger every decision your team makes.
CAM Recovery Audit
A CAM recovery audit is a review of the common area maintenance charges a landlord billed you, checked against what the lease actually permits. It looks for charges the lease excludes, caps that were exceeded, allocation errors, and costs that should never have entered the pool, then builds the claim to recover them.
Both. The summary review catches allocation and arithmetic errors. When the landlord’s general ledger and invoice detail is provided, which most leases allow you to request under the audit rights clause, REAL reconciles those line items against the statement and the lease.
As far as the documents you can supply and the lease permits. There is no fixed limit in the product. What is actually recoverable depends on the lookback period and objection window written into each lease, plus the governing law, and REAL reads those terms from the lease itself.
Capital items billed into the operating pool, caps on controllable expenses exceeded, leasing and tenant-procurement costs recategorised as general and administrative, management fees at a rate or on a base the lease does not support, services that do not benefit your premises, gross-up applied to the wrong occupancy assumption, and pro-rata shares calculated on a denominator that was quietly reduced.
Your share is your area divided by the centre’s leasable area. If space is taken out of that denominator, for instance floors withdrawn during a renovation, without your share being restated, your percentage rises and you absorb cost that is not yours. REAL checks the denominator against the rent roll each cycle.
It covers different ground. A contingency audit is a deep one-time review of selected leases in exchange for a share of the recovery. REAL runs every reconciliation every cycle and the recovery stays with you. Many teams use both, with REAL providing coverage and a firm handling a small number of contested disputes.
Every cycle, which is what REAL is built for. Two moments deserve extra attention: before a renewal, where past errors can be credited against future obligations, and on exit, where the final reconciliation is the last chance to correct anything.
REAL runs in a single tenant on your data, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified, and your data is never used to train any model.
Own or manage the properties instead? See CAM reconciliation for landlords
See REAL audit one of your own reconciliations against the lease that governs it.