KBA Lease Services, the pioneer and leader in commercial real estate lease auditing, has launched KBAi, an AI tool that performs full desk audits of operating expense and common area maintenance costs, providing overpayment risk analytics at scale. KBAi embeds KBA’s unique expense analysis methodology and applies it to entire lease portfolios, reducing months of work down to minutes and enabling it to identify millions of dollars in rent overcharges for its clients. KBA has been using and refining KBAi since 2024, and it helped lead KBA to its strongest two years on record, where the firm identified more recoverable savings than in any comparable period in its four-decade history, including multiple eight-figure resolutions.

“Commercial leases are far more complex than they were even a decade ago,” said Marc Betesh, Founder of KBA. “Both landlord and tenant attorneys have become more sophisticated and are drafting increasingly nuanced controls into leases. This makes it much more difficult and time-consuming for tenant and landlord administrators to validate their pass-through charges.”

“Evaluating the gaps between what a lease says and what it should have said to produce a fair financial result is a rare and valuable perspective in the world of lease auditing,” said Jason Aster, Managing Director at KBA. “Manually scaling the required experience and skill to find and fix such subjective situations is difficult. The beauty is that we have now embedded more than 40 years of multichannel expertise and unmatched results into KBAi, which now applies our unique analysis methodology to entire portfolios in a fraction of the time.”

“To perform even the simplest desk audit, you have to collect years of operating expense reconciliations, trend the expenses, and identify every lease provision that touches those charges,” said Lou Ferro, CPA, Managing Director of Advisory Services at KBA.

KBAi ingests leases and landlord financial information to eliminate the manual data preparation at the early stages of the review process. It then flags and prioritizes potential overcharges by automating document and critical date tracking, configuring multi-year expense trend dashboards, and weighting and grading lease language based on its potential to create overbillings. KBAi reduces the time spent on that work by 75% to 90%.

KBAi recommends what additional data is necessary to assess flagged issues and identifies where abnormal charges may be valid. It also compares landlord billing methodologies against how KBA believes charges should be fairly calculated. Each potential claim gets a confidence rating around its chances of success based on lease language and KBA’s history with similar situations.

“We rarely need to conduct intrusive field audits of landlords’ books and records anymore,” Ferro said.

Alex Soloway, KBA’s Head of Operations, added, “KBAi keeps learning how our experts think about these subjective situations so we can find and fix more of them in less time. It helps identify patterns, spot areas that deserve attention, and predict potential savings.”

Future updates to KBAi will include the ability to ingest landlord accounting documentation to further assess and quantify potential overcharge situations. This will help tenants confirm they pay only for what the lease requires and what was equitably expected when the deal was negotiated.

With all the focus on AI, KBA’s people remain as critical as ever to the success equation. Soloway continued, “Our staff is growing despite newfound efficiencies. Determining whether something is actually incorrect — and how it should be resolved — still requires experienced professionals who understand leasing law, accounting, and real estate operations, especially for new and nuanced issues.”

Visit KBALease.com to learn more.

About KBA Lease Services

KBA is a nationwide advisory firm that works exclusively on behalf of commercial tenants to recover rent overcharges and reduce occupancy costs. KBA consists of CPAs, attorneys, former brokers, engineers, and property managers, all of whom have extensive experience in building operations, law, accounting, property management, and lease administration.

KBA has worked with hundreds of clients of all shapes and sizes — occupiers spanning all industries, including the world’s largest banking institutions, global advertising holding companies, the largest infrastructure and technology companies, the biggest insurance and wealth management firms, Big Four accounting firms, global real estate brokerage firms, a multitude of AmLaw 200 firms and many more.

Learn more at KBALease.com/about.

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