Commercial leases
Leases are long, individually negotiated, and nearly identical in structure — which is the exact shape that makes reading one at a time so wasteful. The portfolio question is comparative.
What a row is
One lease — one set of premises. Side letters, rent deposit deeds, licences to alter and deeds of variation belong in a bundle with the lease they amend, in date order, so that a varied rent review reads as the varied one.
Resist the temptation to bundle by building or by landlord. Ten leases in one tower are still ten agreements with ten sets of terms; bundling them would ask the model to reconcile documents that have nothing to do with each other.
The starting columns
This is the Real Estate preset:
| Column | Type | Prompt |
|---|---|---|
| Parties and Premises | Text | Who are the landlord and tenant, by full legal name, and what premises are let to them? |
| Term | Text | When does the term begin and end, and what happens at expiry — holding over, renewal right, or nothing? |
| Annual Rent | Number | What annual rent does this lease reserve? Answer as a number in the stated currency. |
| Rent Review or Escalation | Text | How does the rent change over the term — fixed uplift, index-linked, open market rent review — and on what dates? |
| Service Charge Cap | Text | What cap, if any, applies to service charge or common area maintenance costs recharged to the tenant? |
| Repair Obligations | Text | Who is responsible for repair and maintenance of the structure, the interior and the plant? |
| Assignment and Subletting | Text | May the tenant assign, sublet or share occupation, and on what conditions or consents? |
| Break Rights | Text | Summarise any break or early termination right: who may exercise it, when, on what notice, and subject to what conditions. |
| Floor Plan | Image | The floor plan or site plan of the premises let. |
The last one is an image column, and it is the one that saves the most time in practice. A floor plan is the page everyone opens the PDF to find, and it is never where you expect it to be — behind the schedules in one lease, appended to the licence to alter in another. Extracting it puts the plan in the row, cropped and citing its page, so comparing demises across a portfolio stops being sixty file-opens.
What it looks like filled in
| Row | Documents | Rent review | Assignment | Service charge cap | Break date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unit 4 Northgate.pdf | CPI-linked, capped at 4% p.12 | Yes, with landlord consent p.28 | £8.50 per sq ft p.31 | 30 Jun 2029 p.4 | |
| Riverside retail.pdf | 3% fixed annually p.9 | No p.22 | Uncapped p.26 | None p.3 | |
| Wharf Street depot.pdfDeed of variation.pdfSide letter.pdf | Open market review, 5-yearly Variation, p.2 | Group companies only p.33 | £6.20 per sq ft p.34 | 24 Dec 2027 Side letter, p.1 |
Setting it up
- One workspace per portfolio, not per property. The comparison is the point, and a table can only see documents in its own workspace.
- Bundle each lease with its variations and side letters before building the table.
- Create the table, take the Real Estate preset, and drop the columns you will not use.
- Run two leases — ideally your most and least standard — and read every citation. Leases are where a plausible wrong answer is easiest to produce, because the same words appear in the rent review clause and in the service charge schedule.
- Adjust the prompts, then run the portfolio.
Columns worth adding
- Break date as a date column and break notice period as a number in months. These are the two columns anyone actually sorts by, and they are the reason the table exists.
- Tenant break conditions as text, separately — a break right conditional on vacant possession and payment of all sums is materially different from an unconditional one, and collapsing the two into “yes” loses the thing that matters.
- Repair obligation as a category: full repairing, schedule of condition, internal only, Not stated.
- Rent review basis as a category rather than prose — upwards-only, open-market, CPI, RPI, fixed, Not stated — so the portfolio can be counted rather than read.
What to check before relying on it
Three specific traps on leases:
- Caps that are not caps. A service charge provision often contains a cap on one component and none overall. Ask for the cap on total pass-through if that is what you mean.
- Consent versus prohibition. “Yes, with consent” and “yes” are different answers, and a yes/no column will not show you which one it found. Keep the prose column beside the boolean.
- Superseded terms. If a variation is not bundled with its lease, the table will confidently report the original rent review. This is the single most common wrong answer in a lease portfolio, and it is a setup problem rather than an extraction one.
Roughly what it costs
Sixty leases averaging 60 pages is 3,600 pages — 3,600 credits, $9, once. The preset’s nine columns across sixty rows is 2,160 credits, about $5.40 — the image column costs what the typed ones do. Bundled rows cost more on the columns, because each document past the third in a bundle is read separately; most lease bundles are two or three documents and land inside the included allowance. See how credits work.
The preset’s prompts are illustrative starting points, not legal definitions, and nothing here is advice about your leases.