Checklist for Leasing Automation Tender

A leasing director at a regional shopping centre once showed us a spreadsheet with 147 tabs. One tab per unit, updated by hand every Monday from three different counting systems installed by three previous owners. The turnover-rent clauses in the leases referenced footfall thresholds that nobody could verify without two days of reconciliation. That spreadsheet is what a leasing automation tender is really trying to replace, and most tender documents never say so.

If your tender reads like a shopping list for sensors, you will receive sensor quotes. If it describes the leasing workflows you want to run without manual intervention, you will receive proposals you can actually compare. The checklist below is organised around that distinction.

Define the workflows before the hardware

Write down the five to eight leasing processes that currently consume analyst time. Typical candidates:

• Monthly footfall statements sent to tenants, including any turnover-rent trigger calculation
• Unit-level performance benchmarking used in renewal negotiations
• Vacancy marketing packs with verified traffic at the door of the empty unit
• Service-charge apportionment where footfall share is part of the formula
• Occupancy reporting to landlords, lenders or valuers

Each workflow should appear in the rfp template as a functional requirement with a stated output, a frequency and a named recipient. Vendors then have to explain how their retail analytics platform produces that output, not just whether it counts people. This one change filters out a surprising share of bidders.

Put accuracy in the contract, not the brochure

Footfall figures that feed rent calculations will be challenged. A tenant who is 2% over a turnover threshold will ask how the number was produced. Your tender therefore needs a contractual accuracy floor, a defined measurement method and a remedy if the floor is missed.

Vemco Group, for example, commits contractually to a minimum of 96% counting accuracy, with typical performance between 98% and 99% where lighting, layout and visitor behaviour allow. The useful part for procurement is not the headline percentage but the fact that it is a written guarantee you can copy into your requirements. Any vendor unwilling to put a floor in writing is asking you to carry the dispute risk yourself.

Specify in the tender how accuracy will be validated: manual count sample size, who performs it, at which entrances, and how often after go-live. Ask for the vendor's standard validation protocol as an attachment.

The unit-mapping problem nobody puts in the RFP

Here is what implementers learn the hard way. A people counting system counts at entrances. Leases are written against units. The two do not stay aligned. Units get split, merged, extended into the mall corridor or handed a shared entrance with the neighbour during a refit. Every one of those events breaks the link between a counter and a lease line, and if nobody owns the re-mapping, the automated tenant statements go out wrong.

Your tender should require:

• A data model where entrance, zone and lease unit are separate objects with effective dates
• A documented process and named responsibility for re-mapping after any physical change
• Historical continuity, so a unit that was two units last year still produces a comparable trend
• A price for re-mapping work, or confirmation that it is included

Ask bidders to describe how they handled a unit merger for an existing client. The quality of that answer tells you more than any accuracy claim.

Hardware independence protects the next owner

The 147-tab spreadsheet existed because each previous owner bought a closed system. A tender for people counting software that only runs on the vendor's own sensors repeats the mistake. Insist on a platform that is device-independent and sensor-agnostic, able to ingest data from existing counters as well as new ones. This matters in three specific situations:

• Portfolio acquisitions where the incoming asset has a different installed base
• Phased replacement where you cannot afford to swap every sensor in year one
• Mixed environments where some entrances need 3D stereo counters and others are fine with simpler devices

Request a list of sensor types and manufacturers currently supported, and score it during vendor evaluation. Also state whether you require hosted or private cloud deployment; some lender and valuer data-handling requirements make this a hard constraint rather than a preference.

Integration requirements that survive contact with IT

Leasing automation only happens when footfall data lands in the systems where leases live. Name those systems in the tender. If your lease administration runs in an ERP module, say which one. If renewal analysis sits in a BI tool, name it. If tenant sales data arrives through POS feeds under lease reporting clauses, state the format and frequency.

Vemco Group's VemFusion layer connects counting data to POS, BI, ERP and CRM systems, which is the type of integration capability you should be asking every bidder to demonstrate rather than describe. Require a live or recorded demonstration of a data push to a system comparable to yours, and ask who maintains the integration when either side upgrades.

Data ownership, tenant access and privacy

Three clauses procurement teams routinely omit and later regret:

• Ownership: the landlord owns all raw and processed footfall data, with export in a documented format at contract end and no deletion without written instruction
• Tenant access: whether tenants receive portal logins, what they can see, and whether their access is a landlord decision or a vendor product tier
• Privacy: confirmation that the counting method does not store personally identifiable data, with the technical explanation attached rather than asserted

If the platform will also serve as occupancy management software for live capacity or safety reporting, add retention rules for real-time data and specify who can trigger alerts.

What to request rather than assume

Do not rely on marketing pages for the items that end up in a dispute. Require every bidder to submit, as separate attachments: current security and quality certifications, the full service-level agreement including uptime measurement and data-latency commitments, support hours and escalation paths by region, and at least two reference sites with a comparable number of lease units where you may speak to the leasing team directly. Score the completeness of these attachments. A vendor who sends a brochure instead of an SLA has answered the question.

Scoring the bids

A weighting that has worked for portfolio landlords: 30% on workflow coverage against your named leasing processes, 20% on contractual accuracy and validation method, 20% on integration demonstration, 15% on hardware independence and migration path, 15% on commercial terms including re-mapping costs. Price per sensor, the figure most bidders lead with, sits inside that last 15%. It is almost never where the money is lost. The money is lost in the analyst who still updates the spreadsheet because the automation never reached the lease.

If you are drafting a leasing automation tender and want a second opinion on the accuracy clause, the unit-mapping requirements or the integration questions before the document goes out, contact Vemco Group. We will review your requirements against what we have seen work across shopping centre and retail portfolio tenders, and tell you plainly where the gaps are.