Neither Occupier nor Visual Lease publishes a price. Occupier states the shape of its bill (per lease, per module, annual, unlimited users, a minimum of 20 leases per tier) and routes every number through a quote. Visual Lease states nothing: its pricing URL redirects to a product page, and the only path is a Request Pricing form. Occupier is built for tenants; Visual Lease is now owned by CoStar, whose core customers are brokers and landlords.
This comparison is for US finance and real estate leads at multi-location businesses, retail, restaurant, fitness, healthcare and corporate occupiers, who have both platforms on a shortlist and need to budget before booking two demos. Every figure below was read on each vendor's own site, not from a directory.
Occupier vs Visual Lease at a glance
| Factor | Occupier | Visual Lease |
|---|---|---|
| Published price | None. "Please contact us for pricing by requesting a quote" | None. visuallease.com/pricing redirects to a solutions page |
| Pricing unit | Per active lease, per module, billed annually | Not stated publicly |
| Entry minimum | 20 leases per tier, extra leases priced per lease | Not stated publicly |
| Seats | Unlimited users, no per-seat fee | Not stated publicly |
| Owner | Occupier, independent | CoStar Group (footer reads "© 2026 CoStar Group") |
| Abstraction of your back catalog | Separate professional services package | Sold as a service; AI Lease Abstraction is a named feature |
How much does Occupier cost?
Occupier does not publish a number, but it publishes the structure, which is more than most of this market does. Its pricing page describes "simple per-lease, per-module pricing with no hidden fees, no per-seat charges, and expert support included in every plan." Its own FAQ answers the cost question with one line: "Please contact us for pricing by requesting a quote."
Three tiers sit on top of Lease Administration. Basic covers leases and owned properties, critical date tracking, clause management, unlimited document storage and AI clause intelligence. Professional adds custom fields, configurable dashboards, monthly rent variance reporting, scheduled exports and dedicated support. Enterprise adds SFTP export automation, custom integrations and quarterly business reviews. Lease Accounting, Deal Management, Business Licenses and equipment leases are add-on modules, priced separately.
The number that decides whether Occupier fits a small portfolio is the minimum. In Occupier's words: "All customers start with Lease Administration as the foundation, selecting either the Basic or Professional tier based on their operational needs. Each tier includes a minimum of 20 leases, with additional leases priced on a per-lease basis." If you have 8 leases, you are paying for 20. Occupier also counts only active leases, so expired and terminated records do not inflate the bill.
How much does Visual Lease cost?
Visual Lease publishes nothing at all. A request for visuallease.com/pricing does not land on a pricing page: it redirects to the lease accounting software solutions page. The navigation offers Request Pricing and Request Demo, and both are forms. There is no tier list, no unit of pricing, and no minimum stated anywhere public.
That is a meaningful difference from Occupier, and it is the one most comparison pages skip. With Occupier you can model a budget before the call by counting your active leases and deciding which modules you need. With Visual Lease you cannot model anything until a salesperson gives you a number, which means the first quote arrives after you have already spent an hour explaining your portfolio. Bring your own arithmetic to that call.
What is the difference between Occupier and Visual Lease?
The honest one-line answer: Occupier is a tenant-side platform that bundles real estate operations and lease accounting for multi-location businesses, while Visual Lease is an enterprise lease accounting platform with deeper ERP integration and a much longer compliance track record.
Visual Lease leans on accounting. It covers ASC 842, IFRS 16, GASB 87 and GASB 96, adds sustainability reporting, and lists integrations with the large ERP systems that finance teams at bigger companies run on. If your lease population is large, your auditors are demanding, and your disclosures are the hard part of the job, that depth is real.
Occupier leans on the work around the lease. Critical dates, clause tracking, renewal decisions, deal pipeline and rent variance sit in the same place as the accounting module, and unlimited seats mean the facilities coordinator and the controller look at the same record. Its named industries are retail, restaurant, corporate, fitness, franchise and healthcare, which is a fair description of who it is built for.
Who owns Visual Lease?
CoStar Group. Visual Lease was acquired in November 2024, and the Visual Lease site now carries "© 2026 CoStar Group" in its footer. This matters commercially for two reasons, and neither appears on the vendor comparison pages that rank for this query.
First, CoStar also sells CoStar Real Estate Manager. If you shortlist Visual Lease against CoStar Real Estate Manager thinking you have two vendors bidding, you have one. We covered that specific trap in Visual Lease vs CoStar Real Estate Manager. Second, CoStar's core business serves brokers, landlords and investors. Occupier makes this argument loudly in its own marketing, and while it is self-interested, the ownership fact underneath it is true and worth asking about: where does a tenant-side product sit on a landlord-side company's roadmap.
The cost that is in neither quote
Both platforms bill for holding lease data. Neither subscription includes the work of getting your existing leases into a structured form in the first place, and that is usually the largest line in year one.
Occupier is explicit about it: "Your annual subscription covers the platform, unlimited users, and standard support. Implementation services (lease abstraction, data migration, training) are available as separate professional services packages based on portfolio size and complexity." Visual Lease sells abstraction as a service too, and now markets an AI Lease Abstraction feature. Either way, somebody has to read every lease, every amendment, every side letter, and turn them into fields.
This is the part you can decouple. Abstraction is not locked to the platform you pick, and the output is a spreadsheet or an import file that either system will take. Teams that abstract their portfolio first walk into both demos with a lease count, a clean data set and a much shorter implementation, and they stop paying platform fees for months of migration. Our lease abstraction cost guide works through the per-lease numbers for service, software and in-house review, and commercial lease management software pricing compares the pricing unit across ten platforms.
One practical note for the finance side of this decision. Occupier's monthly rent variance reporting exists because invoiced rent drifts from the lease schedule, through escalations, CAM true-ups and missed abatement. Whichever platform you land on, it only catches the drift it knows about, so teams watching a real estate budget across many locations usually want an alert the moment spend moves against plan as well as a monthly report.
Which one should you choose?
| Your situation | Closer fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 40 to 400 retail or restaurant units, one team doing real estate and finance | Occupier | Unlimited seats, deal pipeline and accounting in one place |
| Large lease population, heavy disclosure workload, ERP-centric finance | Visual Lease | Deeper accounting and ERP integration, longer compliance history |
| Public entity reporting under GASB 87 or GASB 96 | Visual Lease | Both standards are named on the product; Occupier lists GASB 87 in its accounting module |
| Under 20 leases | Neither yet | Occupier's floor is 20 leases; abstract the portfolio and run it on a schedule first |
What to ask on both calls
Because neither vendor publishes a rate card, the call is where the comparison actually happens. Ask both for the same five things in writing, and the quotes become comparable:
- The annual subscription, stated separately from services. One blended number hides which part recurs.
- The unit and the minimum. Per active lease, per location, per module, and what the floor is at your count.
- What abstraction and migration cost. Per lease, and what happens when an amendment arrives later.
- What the accounting module adds. On both platforms it is priced on top of administration.
- What export looks like on exit. Ask for the format and whether it includes clause references.
Our fuller breakdowns sit on the Occupier alternatives and Visual Lease alternatives pages, and every vendor price we can verify is collected on the lease abstraction software pricing comparison.