The contract problem that cost me two hours at a time
53 tenants, 30 contracts with rent tables that moved every two or three months, and a spreadsheet that was wrong the moment anything changed.
For 14 years I was General Manager of La Tejedora Distrito Creativo, a district in Cumbayá with more than 50 businesses inside two former textile warehouses.
The part nobody warns you about is the contracts.
What 53 tenants actually means
Fifty-three active agreements. Thirty of them carried escalation tables — the rent changed every two or three months, on a schedule written into the document.
So a simple question, "what does this tenant pay in March", meant opening the contract and reading a table. Every time.
- A spreadsheet helped, until a rent changed and the spreadsheet was quietly wrong
- Annual inflation adjustments meant going back to the contracts again
- Contracts ran past 40 pages, so when a tenant asked something, nobody remembered the answer
- Renewals were remembered by luck, and luck occasionally failed
- A new contract meant finding the old one — digital or physical, often disordered — and rewriting it: 60 to 120 minutes
The cost nobody puts in a budget
Two hours to produce a contract is not the real cost. The real cost is that the person producing it is the person who should be thinking about the business, and instead they are copying dates.
And there is a second cost, quieter: the answers given from memory. Somebody asks whether the increase applies this quarter, and someone answers confidently, and is wrong, and it becomes a conversation with a tenant.
What changed
In my own operation, after building the tools: producing a new contract went from 60–120 minutes to about 30 seconds. Increases and expirations became visible without opening anything. Questions got answered from the document itself, or the tenant got a link and asked it themselves.
Those numbers are mine, from an operation with 53 tenants. Yours will be different. The shape of the problem rarely is.
Why I am telling you this rather than listing features
Because I did not learn this from a case study. I lived it for over a decade, and the software exists because of the specific weeks where it cost me a Saturday.
If any of the list above sounds like your Tuesday, that is the conversation worth having.