Our client manages 32 shopping centers with over 5,000 retail outlets across the USA. Each outlet requires a signed lease agreement. These range from simple, standard agreements with small kiosks, to heavily negotiated contracts with large brands and big-box store operators. The leasing department handles all lease document production. Lease packs can include contracts, data sheets with specified premise parameters, lease payment schedules and other relevant attachments. Their creation was a complicated, error-prone and time-consuming process.
A substantial challenge during this type of process is that many variables, such as the wording of the lease agreement, are prone to change because of contract negotiation. These changes may be required multiple times during the negotiation process, necessitating a thorough review of each relevant document to identify and amend the applicable parts. Any inconsistencies found in the contract after it has been signed often resulted in a loss, as clients are rarely willing to amend a contract that is favorable to them.
Following a competitive request for a proposal process, with many contenders, the business selected ActiveDocs as the solution that would increase the speed of its contract turn-around, and improve the accuracy of the produced documents.
Shopping centers and property management
Operations and management of shopping centers.
Automate production of lease contracts and associated documentation while ensuring consistency of data between the lease management system and the negotiated documents.
Integration of ActiveDocs with the lease management system to generate lease packs, and facilitation of round-tripping when contract wording is negotiated.
All initial documentation is produced automatically from data in the lease management system. Contract parameters are always consistent with data in the lease management system, even when leases are heavily modified during negotiations.
ActiveDocs works with the leasing system to ensure that all steps in the business workflow are performed as required – from deal initiation, through negotiations, all the way to signing the finalized contract.
Our client’s documents are generated from the lease management system, which holds all relevant client information. To achieve tighter control of the round-tripping process, the negotiated document wording is edited directly in ActiveDocs.
The solution evaluates all relevant data points in the updated lease packs, ensuring that the documents are refreshed prior to sending to the client for review. The refresh of data affects all relevant parts of documents, and often results in inclusion of a different set of information and updated wording in the regenerated document. Rent type may change for a particular contract, and with it, a number of clauses and supplementary documents.
ActiveDocs works with the leasing system to ensure that all steps in the business workflow are performed as required – from deal initiation, through negotiations, all the way to signing the finalized contract.
The leasing department staff are equipped with a task dashboard containing automatically created lease packs. These are automatically generated when a new deal is created in the lease management system. Negotiators and their assistants have an option to review and manipulate these via the Document Wizard, utilizing ActiveDocs in User-driven Mode. This feature enables them to modify a defined set of parameters and the wording of the lease pack. Once approved, lease packs are ready to send out to the counterparty.
Changes made during the negotiation process can be included in the document through the editable Active Snippet functionality of ActiveDocs. A modified copy of the lease pack is submitted to the lessee, and the accepted changes are applied in the appropriate Snippet by the leasing department. This ensures that while the wording is modified, the data sourced from the lease management system remains unaffected. The solution always automatically refreshes the data in the documents before their delivery to the other party. While with the counterparty, deal documents are locked for editing by the lease management system, preventing any cross-over of changes.
In the future, our client intends to take advantage of ActiveDocs’ ability to work with electronic signatures, which will speed up the signing part of lease negotiations.
Active Snippets and Templates enable wording of lease pack documents to be negotiated freely while protecting data-driven content from editing.
Hybrid Mode of document production, combining User-driven and Automated mode in one solution, makes it possible to generate initial lease packs without any user interaction, while still allowing users to make modifications through Document Wizard where needed.
Integration Capabilities of ActiveDocs enable sourcing of data from the lease management system and integration with its workflow.
The solution enforces the accuracy of the data in the negotiated contract by imposing a data refresh before the newly created or modified lease pack can be released to the other party.
The business can control the round-tripping process through the Active Snippet functionality, which makes it possible to protect the data from being altered, while the surrounding wording can be negotiated as required.
The initial lease packs are generated automatically, with no human interaction, based on the deal parameters defined in the lease management system.
