AI Lease Review: For Inhouse Counsel and Real Estate Teams

Commercial real estate lease agreements are complex, dense documents packed with critical information. Traditionally, reviewing these agreements has been a time-consuming, manual process prone to errors. Growing shortage of skilled talent is making it harder.

Enter AI-powered lease review—a transformative approach that leverages artificial intelligence to analyze leases, flag risks, summarize terms, and streamline decision-making.

Tools like Bryckel’s Clause Protect and LOI-to-Lease Comparison are leading the way, helping real estate landlords, tenants, and investment firms work smarter.

What AI Lease Review Does

Risk Detection
AI identifies non-standard clauses, potential legal issues, and compliance concerns within lease agreements. Either as a list or as smart editing of the draft lease,AI automatically highlights risky clauses and provides actionable recommendations, allowing teams to address problems before they escalate.

Some tools offer codifying your playbook to customize the risk analysis. For instance in retail centers, tenants like Starbucks or McDonalds insist their form be used as draft lease. A landlord can run it against their provisions to get a quick summary of clauses that need negotiating because they don’t align with their standards.

Compliance Checks
AI tools scan leases for adherence to state legislation and disclosure requirements. This ensures that agreements remain compliant with current regulations, reducing the risk of costly violations.

LOI-to-Lease Comparison
One of the biggest challenges in lease management is ensuring that the final lease accurately reflects negotiated terms. Bryckel’s LOI-to-Lease Comparison tool automatically compares letters of intent with draft leases, highlighting discrepancies and preventing costly misunderstandings

Summarization
Complex leases can be overwhelming. AI generates concise summaries of key sections, pulling out critical information for faster review.

It could be for executive summary, investment decisions or outreach to potential clients bringing insights to win their business.

Lease Abstraction
Finally, AI can extract structured data from leases, including dates, rent amounts, renewal options, and legal provisions. Automating this process, making large-scale lease due diligence or operational management far more efficient.

Benefits of AI Lease Review

• Increased Efficiency: Review leases faster and allocate human resources to higher-value tasks.

• Enhanced Accuracy: Reduce errors that manual efforts might miss and ensure that no critical details are overlooked. Offshoring these activities might seem cost effective but the errors become expensive.

• Cost Savings: Automate labor-intensive processes to reduce operational costs. Inhouse counsels and real estate deal teams can save over 80% in costs outsourcing to expensive outside attorneys or analysts.

• Scalability: Handle large volumes of lease documents effortlessly, which is difficult with manual review. M&A Teams process hundreds or thousands of leases which can be costly with outside resources.

• Improved Decision-Making: Access critical lease data in real time to make informed decisions quickly. Generating comprehensive reports or chatting with the documents in a secure environment makes insights effortless.

Who Benefits

• Asset Managers and Property Managers: Quickly identify risks, ensure compliance, and manage large portfolios efficiently.

• Acquisitions and Investment Teams: Go from offering memo to deal closure without hiring an expensive team of analysts and losing time is

• Tenants: Understand obligations, verify lease terms against negotiated agreements, and protect against unfavorable clauses.

• Real Estate Professionals: Save time, reduce errors, and provide higher-quality advice to clients.

• Legal Teams: Focus on complex legal analysis instead of manual document review.

Considerations

While AI lease review tools are powerful, they do not replace professional advice.