Landlord and tenant data sharing is the practice of giving each side of a lease the same operational numbers: footfall, capture rate, turnover and category benchmarks. It replaces the annual argument at renewal with a monthly report both sides already trust, which is a different thing entirely from a clause in a lease that obliges a tenant to email a PDF by the fifth of the month.
The tenant says: we do not have enough sales, give us a rent discount, your marketing brings nobody in, the mall is dead after lunch. The landlord says: the centre is at record footfall, the problem is inside your store. Both sides believe what they are saying, and both are arguing in good faith, because each is looking at a different number. The landlord has the entrance count. The tenant has the till. Nobody in the room has passing traffic at the store front, the capture rate at that door, or the tenant's index against its own category in this specific building.
So the negotiation gets settled by whoever is more stubborn. The loser leaves resentful, and that resentment gets paid twice: at renewal, when a good tenant walks to a competing scheme, and every single month in turnover reports that arrive late, incomplete or suspiciously rounded.
Tenants report turnover because the lease says so. Nothing in the arrangement gives them a reason to be early, accurate or complete. The workflow every finance director recognises: reminder, second reminder, penalty letter, then someone in the finance team keys PDFs into a spreadsheet and the turnover-rent invoice goes out on numbers everyone quietly doubts.
The industry has stopped pretending otherwise. Flote, writing on proptech and the future of retail leases, is blunt: the turnover model relies on tenants sharing transactional data, there has always been suspicion that reported figures are artificially low, and landlords have not wanted to tell tenants when a centre is losing ground to a competitor. ICSC reports that most tenants make errors when reporting sales, and most of those errors are under-reporting. ACROSS Magazine describes the historic relationship as each side guarding its data: tenants reluctant to share sales, landlords hesitant to reveal operational performance. If your turnover-rent income line sits on top of that behaviour, the data quality problem is a revenue problem, not an admin problem.
Retail Week and Yardi asked 50 retail directors responsible for store portfolios a simple question. Only 42 percent receive footfall data from their landlords. The report concluded that better data collaboration could improve store performance and differentiate one landlord offer from another. Read that from the leasing chair rather than the technology chair: if most of your competitors do not share footfall, sharing it is not a cost or a concession. It is a concrete reason for a good tenant to choose your scheme over the one down the road, and to stay when the lease comes up.
Two-way means both sides look at the same view of the same store. In VemTenant, which has been part of the Vemco Group platform since 2013, the landlord dashboard shows total tenant revenue building as submissions arrive, how many tenants have reported with a one-click reminder for the rest, top and bottom performers by category, and every lease expiring in the next 90 days. The tenant dashboard shows that store's revenue trend, its rank within its category, its index against the branch and the whole mall, and the next submission deadline.
Add store-level counting from VemCount and the tenant also sees passing traffic and capture rate at their own door. That is the number that ends the argument, because it separates a location problem from a store problem in front of both parties. If 8,000 people pass the frontage and few come in, the conversation is about the store. If nobody passes, the conversation is about the mall, and the landlord can no longer hide behind the entrance count. On accuracy, be honest with tenants about what the counting can and cannot promise: Vemco states a contractual minimum of 96 percent, with typically 98 to 99 percent achieved when lighting, store layout and visitor behaviour allow. Never quote a flat guaranteed figure; tenants who work with data will test the claim.
One observation from implementations that rarely makes it into a brochure: in the first quarter after tenant dashboards go live, expect a wave of corrections to historic figures. Tenants who can suddenly see their own trend line go back and fix the numbers they rounded or estimated before. Treat it as the system working, not as a data quality crisis, and brief your finance team in advance so nobody panics when restatements arrive.
A tenant is not the landlord's counterparty. A tenant is the landlord's partner in the same customer, and trust and transparency are working conditions of a well-run mall, not a soft benefit to mention at the AGM. What has been missing until now is a mechanism: a two-way platform is the first tool that lets a landlord give tenants something they genuinely value in exchange for the numbers the landlord needs. That exchange is why Vemco Group, a Danish software company founded in 2005 in Fredericia with more than 20 years in people counting and analytics, now sees the majority of its 800 plus shopping mall customers running both footfall counting and tenant reporting across a base of 55,000 plus installations in 98 plus countries. A recent acquisition has added property management to the same platform, pulling leases, turnover and traffic into one place.
Does sharing data weaken the landlord's negotiating position? It removes arguments that were never winnable. Store-level footfall and capture rate is a stronger position than an entrance count, because it answers the tenant's objection instead of talking past it.
What about tenants who refuse to report? Give them a method that costs nothing: a POS integration or an SFTP file drop. Most refusals are about effort, not principle, and they fade once reporting takes no time.
Which data should never be shared? One tenant's sales with another tenant. Category averages and mall totals are shared; store figures stay between the store and the landlord.
If your renewal conversations still start with two different sets of numbers, see how VemTenant puts both sides on the same dashboard. And if you want to talk through what two-way data sharing would look like in your specific centre, with your tenant mix and your lease structures, contact the Vemco Group team here.