KBA Lease Services, a commercial lease-auditing firm, has launched KBAi, an AI tool that flags potential rent overcharges for its clients.
KBAi applies KBA’s expense analysis to entire lease portfolios, enabling it to identify millions of dollars in potential overcharges. KBA has been using and refining KBAi since 2024. It has helped the Iselin-based firm deliver the most recoverable savings 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.”
KBAi ingests leases and landlord financial information and then flags and prioritizes potential overcharges, reducing the time spent on that work by 75% to 90%.
Future updates to KBAi will include the ability to ingest landlord accounting documentation to further assess and quantify potential overcharges. This will help tenants confirm they pay only for what the lease requires and what was expected when the deal was negotiated.
KBA said its staff remain as critical as ever to its success.
“Our staff is growing despite newfound efficiencies,” said Alex Soloway, KBA’s head of operations. “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.”
