Barbara Holly likens herself to a sleuth, though her work may not have the glamour and intrigue of tracking killers or wayward spouses. Instead, her investigations begin in the fine print of many a tricky lease agreement.
In place of a magnifying glass, she carries a briefcase full of measuring equipment, a set of convoluted national building standards and an analytical attorney’s mind to pick through the morass.
As a commercial lease auditor, what Holly hopes to find are discrepancies in leases, which can be worth thousands of dollars to Holly and her clients.
Eighty percent of all commercial tenants are overcharged by their landlords, according to Holly, who started Accura Business Services out of her Folsom, Calif., home in March.
Many times, tenants in office buildings, strip malls and warehouses are paying for more space than they actually have because the renters never verify the numbers in their leases, she said. They also commonly are overcharged for maintenance.
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“In our business climate, most people are trying to figure out how they can cut their expenses, so it’s not unusual for someone to call in a management expert or an auditor to figure out how to streamline their business. And essentially, that’s what I am,” Holly said.
Though the business is in its infancy, Holly said she has attracted about 30 clients in the Sacramento area. With several of those cases completed, she has recovered an average of $4,000 per client.
Working on a contingency basis, she keeps half that savings. But if she turns up nothing, she gets nothing.
“It’s not (risky) because the percentage of people with errors is so high,” she explained. In about 80 percent of the cases she has taken, the tenants are owed some money, she said.
Starting a business in the relatively unknown field of lease auditing may seem like an unlikely move for an attorney who was working in Sacramento County’s public defender’s office only last year.
But as she reached the end of a two-year appointment there, Holly decided to look toward real estate law. A Wall Street Journal article on lease auditing that her husband, Joe, read in January peaked their interest and Accura was off the ground three months later.
While her work now isn’t really in the legal field, Holly still relies on the analytical skills she honed at Sacramento’s University of Northern California Lorenzo Patino School of Law, where she earned her degree in 1992.
But she needed special training for her new job, in which she must routinely cull through maintenance agreements and complex national building standards, which require that retail, office, commercial and warehouse spaces be measured differently.
She received that training at Leasehold Analysis Inc., in St. Louis, which has been in the business since 1976. Accura maintains an affiliation with the company, which provides support for $300 a month.
So far, Accura has earned about $12,000, but Holly hopes to see six figures by the end of her first year, citing large recoveries affiliates have made, including one for $48,000 in Florida. Holly is the only full-time employee but her husband, Joe, helps out with taking measurements.
While landlords are most often under scrutiny in such investigations, Holly said she is careful not to antagonize them because the landlord-tenant relationship must continue long after she’s gone. She often has to convince tenants who fear they may lose their location that they should pursue cases in which they’re being overcharged.
“If they were to find out that a bank was only depositing 92 percent of all the monies they gave them, they would expect the bank to make good, and of course the bank would make good because this is a client and they made an error. It’s the same with a landlord,” she said.
Holly has found that most discrepancies are unintentional errors and that landlords are willing to pay back overcharges because they risk losing a tenant. In some cases, the savings can be retroactive to seven years, the statute of limitations in California, she said.