Lease auditors can mean big savings for commercial tenants, experts say

In the market downturn, commercial real estate insiders say a new business is catching on: lease auditing. The service, in which auditors look for discrepancies between the expenses charged by a landlord and the actual expenses allowed in a lease, can cut down a tenant’s operating costs by 10 or 20 percent, those in the auditing industry say. Most worrisome to tenants is that landlords often make “honest errors” in their overcharging, according to Anthony Collura, president of Corporate Real Estate Services, which means a landlord could be overcharging without even knowing it. “I once found a landlord charging probably 10 times the cost of certain cleaning supplies that the tenant would have paid had it been an independent cleaning contractor,” Collura said. “The turn of phrase, the change of a word could make a big difference in a lease, so you have to be very careful.”