What about lease amendments and riders?

Upload the base lease together with executed amendments and riders. PaperAI processes them as a single document so the abstracted record reflects the executed terms, not just the original lease.

Can I migrate abstracted leases out of PaperAI later?

Yes. All abstracted data exports as CSV or JSON with named CRE fields. You're not locked in — designed to feed your existing CRE platform, not replace it.

Honest comparison

Lease abstraction — which approach fits your CRE team?

Four ways CRE teams abstract leases today: enterprise CRE platforms, offshore service bureaus, in-house spreadsheets, and modern AI abstraction. Where each one is the right call — and where it isn't.

Lease abstraction is one of the slowest-moving parts of CRE operations. The industry standard has been to outsource it to India at $25–$75 per lease, run a 7–14 day turnaround, and accept whatever variance shows up in the abstracted data. That works for portfolios with light volume — it stops working when your team is the one chasing escalations or option dates.

Below is a category-by-category look at the four main approaches, written for property managers, REIT analysts, in-house CRE counsel, and asset-management teams.

Enterprise CRE platforms

Full lease admin suites — abstracted lease database, critical-date tracking, accounting integrations, and reporting. Priced at $100–$500 per seat per month with annual contracts and implementation cycles measured in months.

Best for

REITs, large institutional owners, and operators with 100+ leases who need a single system of record for the full lease lifecycle.

Why PaperAI

PaperAI is the abstraction step, not the lease admin suite. If you already have Yardi/MRI/VTS and just need cleaner data flowing in, PaperAI extracts to clean CSV that imports directly — without the per-seat lease admin license.

Offshore service bureaus

Outsourced lease abstraction at $25–$75 per lease with 7–14 day turnaround. The dominant approach for last decade because in-house abstraction was too slow and error-prone to scale.

Best for

Owners with steady, predictable lease volume who don't mind the turnaround and have built reconciliation processes around the variance.

Why PaperAI

At 60 seconds per lease with side-by-side analyst review, in-house abstraction is finally faster and cheaper than offshore. The math flips for any team doing more than 10 leases per month.

In-house spreadsheets

Property managers or analysts manually abstracting key fields into Excel or Google Sheets. The default for single-asset owners and small portfolios that can't justify enterprise CRE pricing.

Best for

Single-asset owners, very small portfolios (under 20 leases), or teams where abstraction is a once-a-year activity.

Why PaperAI

PaperAI is the upgrade path that doesn't require switching to a $500/seat enterprise platform. Same workflow as the spreadsheet — drop a lease, get abstracted fields — but without the typing.

Generic AI / cloud document APIs

General-purpose document AI services that can extract from PDFs but don't understand commercial lease structure. Engineering teams sometimes build internal abstraction tooling on top.

Best for

Teams with dedicated engineering who want raw OCR primitives and full control over the abstraction schema.

Why PaperAI

PaperAI ships with the abstraction schema for commercial leases — base rent, escalations, CAM, options, expiration — built in. No prompt engineering, no schema design, no ongoing model maintenance.

Side-by-side feature comparison

Feature	PaperAI	Enterprise platforms	Legacy / ERP-bundled	Manual / DIY
Time per lease abstracted	~60 seconds	Hours to days	7–14 days (offshore)	30–90 min in-house
Cost per lease	~$0.10 (Pro plan math)	Bundled in per-seat license	$25–$75 offshore	$50–$200 internal labor
Handles scanned + multi-language leases	Yes	Varies	Yes (human review)	Yes
Direct push to Yardi / MRI / VTS	CSV today; direct connectors on roadmap	Yes (own the system)	Delivered as Excel/CSV	Manual
Self-serve free tier	Yes — abstract your first lease free	No — sales-led	No — per-lease billing	N/A

PaperAI is the right call when

You abstract 10–500 commercial leases per year
You already have Yardi/MRI/VTS and need cleaner data flowing in
You want to bring offshore abstraction in-house without hiring
You're a single-asset owner or small portfolio who can't justify enterprise pricing

PaperAI is the wrong choice when

You need a full lease admin system of record — use an enterprise CRE platform
You abstract under 5 leases per year — your existing process is fine
You need critical-date alerts and accounting integration today (we export to your CRE platform, but we don't replace it)

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Common questions

Answers focused on conversion quality, team workflows, and roadmap clarity.

Fixed-percent, CPI, and stepped escalations extract cleanly into structured fields. Complex multi-tier escalation schedules and conditional CPI floors/ceilings get flagged for analyst review in the side-by-side view, so a human verifies the value before it hits your lease admin system.