Written for the person who owns the leases

Multi-unit franchisees

You signed near-identical leases on the same brand template, often in strip centres with the same kind of landlord. When one of them is billed wrong, they usually all are.

The portfolio below is an illustration, not an average: change the sites, the footprint and the rate on the calculator and the arithmetic follows your own estate.

1. The arithmetic on a portfolio this size

   34 sites at 2,400 square feet and $9.00 per square foot is $734,400.00 of operating expenses billed in a year. At the $14,688.00 to $36,720.00 band typically recoverable on review, that is what a first pass puts at issue, before the years still open multiply it.

2. Pro-rata denominator definition

   Share recomputed from the lease-defined denominator; occupied versus leasable; stale after remeasurement or expansion

3. Snow and seasonal: flat contract versus actual

   Janitorial, landscaping, trash, pest, elevator, fire and life safety, signage: inclusion, controllable classification, year-over-year spike, benchmark outlier

4. What your lease forms have in common

   A brand template repeats a denominator definition, an exclusion list and an audit clause across every unit. The upside is that one finding is a pattern rather than an incident: an anchor left in a denominator, or a share computed on occupied rather than total area, lands on every site signed on that form and in every year still open.

5. Your portfolio will split three ways

   Some of your leases will let us act for you and take a share of what comes back, some bar it and are priced flat, and some bar a representative altogether and run in self-service with your team sending what we prepare. You get the split, site by site, with the clause reason for each, before anything is signed.

6. Start with five representative sites

   Pick five leases that look like the rest of the estate, send the lease and the last reconciliation for each, and you get the findings, the open years and the route per site. It is the fastest way to know whether the same error is on all of them.