Every year, recoverable operating costs quietly go unbilled. Here's where CAM recoveries leak, how to run a reconciliation that holds up, and how automation now accelerates the audit.
Key Takeaways
- →What it is: CAM reconciliation trues up the operating costs a landlord actually incurred against the estimates tenants were billed — and bills or credits the difference per each lease.
- →Where money leaks: stale pro-rata shares, missing gross-up, untracked caps and base-year stops, under-applied admin fees, estimates never trued up, and missed billing deadlines.
- →The compounding risk: an unindexed base year or an untracked cap doesn't cost you once — it becomes a structural under-recovery that repeats every year.
- →Do it right: abstract the lease, build a clean expense pool, apply gross-up, allocate by pool, apply caps, add fees exactly as permitted, then true up and bill on time.
- →Automation helps: AI lease abstraction and RPA now cut the manual errors that cause leakage and let you audit a whole portfolio, not a sample.
