Depending on how it's negotiated and then managed, a business lease can be your best asset or a dreaded liability. 

When talking to experts in the field, all agree that getting the most out of your lease investment is not congruent with a 'sign it then set and forget' approach. Your lease is a complex agreement and needs to be efficiently managed.

Lee Trevena of LeaseEagle, explains why this is the case, and how they address the challenge through their platform for retail franchisors in particular.

Describing the business

Lee describes LeaseEagle as "...a location management tool for retail franchise groups to manage the lease and franchise relationships, and documentation they have across their portfolio."

With a background in corporate and retail property for 12 years, Lee founded  the company in 2005, with the aim of helping retail tenants and franchisors to expand their network, negotiate leases, find new sites, and grow their chains.

The importance of your lease

Clearly, a point of concern and attention for Lee that underpins his approach to the business, is the importance of the real estate your retail business is operating from. 

"It's the framework of the entire business, but it's often overlooked as just a means to an end, as opposed to a strategic function within the business, and so I think, as we often say, things won't necessarily go wrong with your leases or your property every day, but when they do go wrong, they go wrong big..."

According to Lee, the way you can avoid things going wrong 'big', is to have both a strategic and an administrative approach to be able to manage the portfolio from a lease obligation and financial point of view.

Back to innovation

Comfortably describing LeaseEagle as a technology company at its core, Lee describes their future focus is on getting back to innovation.

"We've been very focused on growing very rapidly both in Australia and overseas, and that has meant that we've had to be focused on a lot of business functions, and we're looking forward to getting back to the innovation side of the technology, and really growing that innovative side, which is at the core of our business."

One area of focus in this innovation is their development of a new automation tool to help businesses with an international lease portfolio to report and manage the new international financial lease regulations. 

The new regulations "..require (franchisors in this case) to change the way that they account for their real estate and other leases in their business..."

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