Commercial property management software.

What makes software commercial, not residential

Most software sold to small property managers was built for apartments, with a commercial page added later. The gap shows the first time real work starts.

Commercial software measures space in rentable square feet, because one lease often spans several suites. It treats recovery as a core workflow, not a miscellaneous charge. And it keeps every version of a lease, because a fourth amendment is normal.

• Rentable and usable square feet, with load factor
• Leases spanning several suites, tracked per suite
• Recovery pools, base years, gross-up, and caps
• Percentage rent with breakpoints for retail
• CPI and fixed escalations written into future billing
• Rent roll per square foot, stacking, and rollover reports

How to evaluate commercial property management software

Every demo looks fine. What matters is reconciliation season, and whether the numbers survive a tenant who disputes them. Bring one real lease with a base year and a cap, and ask each vendor to reconcile it in front of you.

• Can it gross up variable costs and show the basis?
• Does it apply the base year before the cap, provably?
• Does it keep a calculation trace an auditor could read?
• Can one lease span several suites with one recovery share?
• Does the rent roll report per square foot?
• Can you try it before a sales call?

Recovery is the workflow that decides everything

CAM recovery is the largest recurring calculation in commercial property management, and the one number sophisticated tenants audit. Under-recover and you absorb operating expense. Over-recover and you face a dispute you cannot support.

The waterfall runs in a fixed order: pool actuals, exclusions, gross-up, admin fee, tenant share, base year, cap, and estimates billed. Change the order and the answer changes, which is why software should own it.

Why the real incumbent is Excel

Ask a small commercial firm what it uses and the honest answer is usually a workbook. It is free, flexible, and it works. Any evaluation should take that seriously.

A spreadsheet cannot explain itself a year later. It has no version history, no audit trail, and no record of the order deductions ran in. It drifts from the lease whenever a term changes and the formula does not.

Where AI helps, and where it does not

AI is good at reading a lease and proposing a structured abstract, with each field citing the text it came from. It should not compute your recoveries. The waterfall is arithmetic that must be reproducible, so in Vespy AI proposes abstracts, a person approves them, and the recovery engine is ordinary, tested code.