Checklist for Leasing Automation Tender

Most leasing automation tenders fail eighteen months after award, not at award. The centre goes live, tenants receive automated footfall and performance statements, and then a fashion anchor disputes its turnover rent because the entrance count it was given does not match its own door sensor. Nobody can say which figure is right, because the tender never asked the vendor to prove accuracy in that specific doorway, never defined who owns the raw data, and never required an audit trail. The contract is fine. The specification was thin.

This checklist is written for the people who have to fix that: procurement teams drafting the document, asset managers who will live with the outcome, and consultants asked to score bids. It assumes you already know what leasing automation is. What follows is what to put in the tender so the automated numbers hold up when money depends on them.

Define what the automation is actually automating

"Leasing automation" covers at least four different workflows, and vendors will quote against whichever one suits them. Before the rfp template is filled in, write down which of these are in scope, and in what priority:

• Tenant performance statements — automated monthly or weekly reports of footfall, dwell and, where POS is connected, sales per visitor, delivered to each tenant without manual assembly.
• Turnover and footfall-linked rent — calculations that feed the lease administration or ERP system, where a counting error becomes an invoicing error.
• Leasing evidence — zone-level traffic and conversion data used by the leasing team to price units, justify rent steps and win prospects.
• Occupancy and capacity — live counts for common areas, car parks and food courts, which is occupancy management software territory rather than reporting.

Each has a different tolerance for error and a different integration path. A tender that treats them as one line item will get a price for the easiest and a product for none of them.

Accuracy: make it contractual, not marketing

Every bid will claim high accuracy. Very few will accept it as a contractual term. The distinction matters because footfall in a leasing context is a financial input. Ask for three things in writing:

• A contractual minimum accuracy per entrance, measured against a manual count under an agreed method. A guaranteed floor of 96% is achievable and can be written into the tender; in practice, well-installed systems typically deliver 98 to 99% when lighting, layout and visitor behaviour allow. Be suspicious of any bid that promises a flat 99% regardless of site.
• A validation protocol at commissioning and at defined intervals afterwards, with the results stored where tenants can request them.
• A remedy: what happens when a validation count falls below the floor. Recalibration timelines, credit against fees, and how disputed periods are restated.

Here is the observation most implementers will recognise but few tenders capture: accuracy is rarely lost in the sensor. It is lost in zone definition. An anchor tenant whose entrance opens onto both the mall and the car park, a service corridor that staff use forty times a day, a kiosk placed inside another tenant's counting line — these produce arguments that no calibration certificate resolves. Require the vendor to walk every count line with your operations team before installation and to document each zone boundary in a schedule that becomes part of the contract. The schedule is what you will reach for when a tenant disputes a number.

Data ownership and portability

Landlords change vendors. Portfolios get sold. The tender must state that raw counts, zone definitions and historical series belong to the property owner, are exportable in a documented format at any time, and survive contract termination. Ask specifically whether the platform is device-independent — whether the software can run on sensors already in the ceiling and on whatever hardware is chosen in five years. A sensor-agnostic people counting system lets you replace failed or obsolete hardware without losing the historical baseline that leasing negotiations depend on. A platform locked to one manufacturer's devices makes every hardware refresh a data migration.

Also ask where the data lives. Hosted cloud is usually the fastest route, but some owners and their auditors require a private cloud or on-premise instance for lease-critical data. Bidders should offer both without a price shock.

Integration: name the systems, not the concept

A vague "must integrate with existing systems" clause gives a vendor room to quote a generic API and charge for every connector later. List the actual systems by name and version: the lease administration or ERP platform that issues turnover rent invoices, the BI environment the asset team reports from, any tenant POS feeds you plan to collect, and the CRM used by the leasing team. Then ask each bidder how the connection is made. Vemco's approach, for example, is a single integration layer, VemFusion, that connects people counting software to POS, BI, ERP and CRM systems, so a new tenant feed or a change of finance platform does not require a rebuild. Whatever the vendor's architecture, the tender should require a fixed price for the named integrations and a rate card for additions.

Include a scaling clause. Many owners tender for one flagship centre and then want the same retail analytics platform across a regional portfolio. Ask how pricing, user roles and reporting templates behave when the estate grows from one asset to twenty, and whether multi-country deployments are handled in one instance.

Tenant-facing delivery

The tenants are the audience for most of this automation, yet they rarely appear in the tender. Specify:

• How tenants access their data — portal, scheduled report, or both — and whether they see only their own zone plus centre totals.
• Whether tenants can be given read access to validation results for their entrance.
• The dispute workflow: who investigates, how quickly, and how corrections are versioned so both parties see the original and the restated figure.

Transparency here reduces disputes more than any accuracy figure does. A tenant who can see the method rarely questions the result.

Vendor evaluation: what to request rather than assume

Do not rely on brochure claims for the items that decide the contract. Require every bidder to submit, as part of the tender response:

• Current security and data-protection certifications, with scope and expiry.
• Service level commitments for uptime, sensor fault detection and data gaps, with the reporting mechanism that proves them.
• Support terms by region and language, since a multi-country portfolio needs more than one time zone covered.
• Reference sites of comparable size where footfall is used in lease terms, with permission to speak to the asset manager rather than the marketing contact.

Score the vendor evaluation on evidence supplied, not on the confidence of the presentation. A bidder who can put accuracy, data ownership and integration pricing into contract language has already done the hard part of the project.

Commissioning and the first ninety days

Write the acceptance criteria into the tender rather than negotiating them after award. Acceptance should depend on validated accuracy at every count line, signed zone schedules, successful test transactions into the lease administration system, and at least one full reporting cycle delivered to a pilot group of tenants. Hold a meaningful portion of the fee against acceptance. The vendor that objects to this is telling you something about how the go-live will go.

If you are preparing a leasing automation tender and want a second opinion on the accuracy, data ownership or integration clauses before it goes to market, contact Vemco Group. We will review your draft specification against what we have seen work in centre-wide deployments and tell you where a bidder is likely to find room to under-deliver.