Checking every rent agreement against what was actually paid
An infrastructure group rents offices, homes and guest houses for its staff. Reading every agreement, recalculating each rent and checking the documents themselves showed where the payments and the paperwork drifted apart.
From our own project and product work. Client names and identifying details are removed, and some figures are rounded.
The situation
A large infrastructure group rents many properties: offices, staff housing and guest houses. Each agreement sets the rent, the area, the escalation schedule and the lease terms. The group wanted to know whether what it paid matched what the agreements said, and whether it was paying a fair rent for each property.
What we did
- Read the agreements. A Python parser pulled the terms out of the agreement PDFs into one table.
- Recalculate. For each property, we worked out rent per square foot, the escalated rent and the rent that should be due today, and compared them with the amounts paid in the group's system.
- Compare like with like. Within each state or region, properties were scored against their peers with RMSD and Z-scores, so an unusually expensive rent stands out.
- Read the documents. Every agreement was also examined by eye for handwritten additions, struck-out and rewritten terms, whitener, unclear pages, pasted emails and missing supporting papers.
- Fix the source. We designed a standard agreement format, so future agreements are easy to parse and check.
What we found
| Property type | Observations |
|---|---|
| Offices | 19 |
| Staff housing, first group | 12 |
| Staff housing, second group | 5 |
| Guest houses | 2 |
| Total | 38 |
The observations covered rewritten dates, names and lease terms, whitener and overwriting, details that differed between sections of the same agreement, missing documents and unclear pages. The rent recalculation showed losses building up on several properties, which we summarised region by region.
What changed
- From agreements on file to agreements in data. Every term can be checked against every payment.
- From one property to its peers. Statistics show which rents are out of line in their region.
- From paper problems to a standard. One agreement format makes the next review faster.
Products and services
LawRence reads contracts and compares their terms with what was paid. See contract review and energy and infrastructure.