As Depeche Mode says, everything counts in large amounts, and that’s true for Property investment as well. After all, maybe it is no coincidence that the single is taken from an album titled “Construction Time Again”. Ok, I digress.

Anyway… already in 2008, a report by the Mayor of London pointed out how, in residential, “To achieve acceptable levels of return, a large landlord must achieve critical mass. Residential landlords need to be big enough or have achieved sufficient economies of scale to absorb the costs of management through efficiency gains”.  Even more so after the increase in stamp duties made it less appealing for buy-to-let investors to manage small property portfolios.

Now, it goes without saying, managing a large portfolio of properties can be challenging.  Onboarding and selecting tenants, collecting rent, chasing up unpaid rent, keeping track of maintenance costs, carrying out property inspections and dealing with emergency situations take time. A lot of time. Property Management Software solutions are often much needed support for property investors that run a large portfolio in order to help them keep track of their tenancies.

Adding Complexity

When this scenario overlaps with regulatory changes or with the need to check existing regulatory requirements, further complications may appear.  In 2018, changes to the HMO licensing rules have forced landlords to review their tenancy agreements in order to determine if they needed to apply for permission at their local authorities.

Equally so, the proposed overhaul of the Section 21 eviction process, when approved, will require landlords to review, at scale, the terms of their agreements.

But even the current Covid-19 crisis had obvious legal impacts on the current tenancy and commercial lease agreements. For instance, landlords may have had to review their portfolio of contracts looking for hardship clauses, that establish that an agreement can be renegotiated in case of circumstances which create an economic imbalance between the parties. Or for force majeure clauses, to find whether some of the parties’ obligations are suspended under exceptional circumstances.

Cognitiv+ Lease Demo Blog from David Henry on Vimeo

How can I effectively keep track of regulatory requirements when managing a large property portfolio?

Cognitiv+ is a machine learning software that helps landlords and property managers handle the regulatory aspect of their portfolio.

Cognitiv+’s Lease Abstraction solution is able to automatically recognise and extract obligations and key clauses from tenancy, lease, sale agreements and all conveyancing-related documentation.

Once the document is uploaded, the OCR technology transforms the agreement into a machine-readable file and the artificial intelligence system sifts through the contract looking for relevant provisions.

Once the provisions have been identified, they can be extracted into an easily navigable Excel file, containing the most relevant legal and financial information, together with a clear breakdown of each parties’ obligations.

Cognitiv+ dramatically reduces the time involved in reviewing your agreements’ portfolio, it can be customized to identify and extract additional clauses relevant to your business and it can be integrated with your existing property management software.

Cognitiv+ Features at a glance

• Automatic analysis of obligations of the landlord and tenant including prohibitions, discretions and deliverables;
• Automatic extraction of key clauses;
• Presented in a filterable Excel spreadsheet or a Microsoft Word summary;
• The artificial intelligence system continuously learns and improves to find relevant clauses;
• Takes extracts from the agreements and merges them into a letter, report or notice;
• Integrates with existing property management software solutions;
• Reduces the time and costs involved with reviewing and assessing your agreements.

Check out a couple of screenshots of the software…

Would you like to try Cognitiv+? Set up a freemium account and test 100 agreements free of charge for 30 days, including complimentary Obligation extraction reports.

Please contact us to take advantage of our offer.

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