Notice-period math
The wrong renewal decision costs you three ways.
Occupancy creep, deferred capital traps and timing risk. Surfaice models five outcomes against the real notice deadline — not the expiration date — and returns a board-ready recommendation with the clause behind every number.
Operating posture
48 hrs
Maximum window to escalate an unresolved lease document. After three retrieval attempts it is reported as a critical data gap rather than guessed at.
< 6 mo.
The priority cohort — stores whose notice deadline may pass within half a calendar year.
5
Modelled outcomes: renegotiate, renew as-is, short extension, relocate, exit with penalty.
11
Sections in every executive packet, written for real estate, finance, legal, construction and accounting at once.
Why renewals fail quietly
Four fractures before anyone opens a spreadsheet.
Most systems capture dates. Few capture the interplay between the notice clock, rollover economics, a suppressed abstract field and analysis that lives in four places — so teams scramble every quarter.
Countdowns keyed to the wrong date
Renewal clocks run off the expiration field without subtracting the contractual notice period. Teams believe they have quarters when they have weeks.
Character-limited abstracts
Truncation in legacy uploads strips tenant improvement schedules, kickout rent structures, relocation rights and the mechanics of how an option is actually exercised.
Invisible auto-renewal risk
Miss the notice and an evergreen provision rolls the rent without renegotiating market terms — hundreds of thousands in leverage gone per location, silently.
Analysis that never reconciles
Comps in one spreadsheet, capital envelopes in another, occupancy cost in a third — never brought together into one recommendation anyone can cite.
Decision scaffolding
Five modelled paths, against thresholds your CFO already watches.
Each path is modelled rather than argued: the recommendation names one, and the packet shows what the other four would have cost.
Hard stop
Exit with penalty
Termination fees, tenant improvement write-offs, relocation costs and stranded fixtures, weighed against the drag of staying.
Default win path
Negotiate aggressively
When sales per square foot are trending down, occupancy cost is creeping past your guardrail, landlord replacement pressure is high, or comparables support a rent reset.
Inertia rationale
Renew as-is
When rent is materially below market, obligations are manageable, capital spend is negligible and the economics of moving are negative.
Time buy
Short-term extension
A bridge while you pursue a relocation anchor, refresh comparables, finish remediation or clear permitting — modelled as a rent bump bought with flexibility.
Format shift
Relocate strategically
When transfer modelling, clustering strategy or landlord concentration risk justify spending the money now rather than later.
Escalation triggers, portfolio-tunable
- Occupancy cost above 13% — escalate toward renegotiation or relocation
- Sales per square foot contracting faster than trend — stress exit and extension equally
- Market rent materially below in-place rent — renegotiation priority tier
- A capital shock pushing payback past 36 months — flag for board discussion
End to end
From ingestion to synthesis, without losing the citations.
Five stages, each leaving behind what the next one needs — and each leaving behind a record of what it could not find.
- 01
Portfolio ingestion
One schema across lease systems, workplace exports, shared drives and emailed PDFs, with every store prioritised by months remaining until its modelled notice deadline.
Three retrieval attempts, then a named owner
- 02
Clause read and covenant mapping
The full lease is read, not the abstract: renewal options and their rent basis, kickout rent, CPI caps, co-tenancy interplay, improvement schedules, landlord work, relocation rights, casualty and abatement language.
Every covenant cited to its clause
- 03
Four analyses in parallel
Financial, market, physical and portfolio-role streams run at once and converge into one dossier — three to five years of comparables, the occupancy cost stack, competitor moves, capital timelines and sales transfer assumptions.
One dossier, four streams
- 04
Scenarios and sensitivities
NPV overlays for sales moving ±5–10%, rent ladders, improvement variants, capital shocks and occupancy guardrails. Every upside and downside cites either source data or an assumption labelled as one.
Sourced, or labelled an assumption
- 05
Executive packet and quality gate
A recommendation with confidence grading, timelines, owner-assigned actions, citations and a gap log — checked for contradictory math, orphaned assumptions and missing sensitivity bands before it is released.
Checked before it leaves
Sample output
What lands on the board's desk.
Each store produces an eleven-section packet: the recommendation and its confidence, timelines, covenant-driven risks, scenario deltas, capital overlays and sensitivities — with the provenance of each number shown inline.
Renewal analysis · priority 1
sampleStore #0421 · Milwaukee
- Recommendation
- Renegotiate
- Confidence
- High
- Basis
- Occupancy creep, rent above comparables
- Expiration
- Dec 31, 2025
- Notice deadline
- Jun 30, 2025 · 180-day certified mail
Sensitivity snapshot
- Sales −5%
- Occupancy cost 14.9% — breaches guardrail
- Rent +10%
- Margin compresses 180 bps
3
Search attempts before a missing document is escalated
4
Parallel analytic streams per flagged store
5 yr
NPV window used for modelled portfolio moves
100%
Assumptions either sourced or flagged — nothing invented silently
Nothing reaches a landlord without your approval.
Surfaice reads, analyses and reports. The workflow stays in your lease system, your workplace platform and your legal stack.