MRI lease abstraction: MRI software lease abstraction and lease data, in minutes
MRI Software runs the portfolio, but it runs on lease data someone has to produce first. Leaseabstracts reads each commercial lease PDF, extracts the terms an MRI lease record needs, and hands your team a source-linked abstract to review and export. The result is an MRI record that matches the executed lease instead of a rushed re-type, without waiting on an enterprise extraction module or an outsourced abstraction batch.
Last updated July 2026
THE PROBLEM
Built for lease administrators, property managers, and corporate real estate teams running MRI Software
Leases sit in PDFs while MRI records go stale. Keying dates, rent steps, recoveries, and options into MRI is slow and error-prone, and the enterprise extraction add-on comes with a contract, an implementation, and a sales cycle you do not want to sit through for a batch of 40 leases.
Abstract straight to MRI-ready fields
The AI pulls parties and premises, commencement and expiration, the full rent schedule with every step, recovery method and base year, options with their notice deadlines, and the clause set, structured to map onto the MRI lease record.
No enterprise implementation
Start with your first lease today. No annual contract, no module to license, no six-week onboarding before the first abstract exists.
Source-linked so QC is fast
Every value links back to its page and clause with a confidence score. A reviewer confirms an abstract in minutes rather than re-reading the lease, and nothing untrusted reaches your system of record.
What is MRI lease abstraction?
MRI lease abstraction is the work of pulling the operative terms out of a commercial lease and getting them into MRI Software, so the platform can bill rent, calculate recoveries, track critical dates, and report across the portfolio. MRI stores and calculates on that data. Producing it is a separate step that happens upstream, done by a person reading the document, by an outsourced abstraction team, or by an AI extraction tool whose output a person reviews.
Teams usually notice the gap during a migration or an acquisition. The platform is configured and the users are trained, and then several hundred leases still have to be read and keyed before anything in MRI is worth reporting on. That backlog, not the software, is what sets the go-live date.
How to get lease data into MRI Software
There are four practical routes, and they trade cost against turnaround:
| Route | Typical turnaround | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Manual keying by your own team | 1 to 3 hours per lease | A handful of leases, or leases too unusual to trust to a template |
| Outsourced or offshore abstraction | 2 to 5 business days per batch | Large one-time back catalogs where you want a vendor accountable |
| MRI Contract Intelligence (the former Leverton) | Enterprise implementation first | Large portfolios already committed to the MRI stack |
| Upstream AI abstraction, then import | Minutes per lease plus review | Recurring work and migrations where you need data this week |
The fourth route is what Leaseabstracts does. Upload the lease and its amendments, the AI reads every page and fills the abstract, your administrator reviews the source-linked fields, and you export to Excel or CSV for import or copy into the MRI lease record. Nothing about the output is locked to one platform, so the same abstract loads into MRI, Yardi Voyager, AppFolio, or RealPage.
What lease fields an MRI record needs
An MRI lease record that people actually trust needs more than the term and the rent. These are the field groups that decide whether a manager can work from the system or has to reopen the PDF:
| MRI field group | What we extract from the lease |
|---|---|
| Parties and premises | Landlord, tenant, guarantor, suite, rentable area, load factor |
| Term and dates | Execution, possession, commencement, rent commencement, expiration |
| Rent schedule | Base rent by period, every escalation step, abatement, percentage rent |
| Recoveries | Lease type, base year or expense stop, pro-rata share, caps, exclusions, gross-up |
| Options | Renewal, termination, expansion, ROFR, each with its notice window as a date |
| Charges and deposits | Security deposit and burn-down, letter of credit, TI allowance, parking |
| Clauses | Assignment and sublet, use and exclusivity, holdover, SNDA, estoppel obligations |
The two that cause the most rework are recoveries and options. A recovery structure entered as plain net when the lease actually carries a cumulative cap on controllable expenses will produce a reconciliation your tenant disputes, and our CAM and operating expense page covers why. An option keyed without its notice deadline expressed as an actual date is an option somebody eventually misses.
Does MRI do lease abstraction on its own?
MRI sells AI extraction. MRI Contract Intelligence is the product built from LEVERTON, the AI document extraction company MRI acquired in July 2019, and MRI markets lease abstraction software that reads lease PDFs and pulls out dates, rent, and other terms. So the capability exists inside the MRI stack.
The question for most buyers is not whether it exists but whether it fits the job in front of them. Enterprise extraction is licensed, configured, and implemented, which makes sense when you are standardizing a large portfolio on MRI for years. It makes less sense when a team needs 40 leases abstracted before a closing next month, or when the abstraction volume is a few leases a week. That is the gap an upstream self-serve tool fills, and it is why teams often run both: the enterprise stack for the system of record, a fast self-serve tool for the documents arriving today. If you are weighing the enterprise route against a lighter one, our Leverton and MRI alternative comparison lays out the tradeoff.
Abstracting for an MRI migration or a portfolio acquisition
Migrations and acquisitions are where abstraction volume spikes, and where the usual approach fails quietly. The pattern that works is to abstract in one pass against a fixed field list, rather than letting each analyst decide what matters, so the export lands in MRI in a consistent shape and the exceptions are visible.
Three things are worth deciding before the first lease is opened. First, agree the field list up front, ideally the one your MRI configuration expects, so nothing has to be revisited. Second, confirm every lease file is complete: an abstract built from a base lease whose three amendments are sitting in a different folder will be confidently wrong about the rent, which is the failure mode covered on our lease amendment guide. Third, decide who reviews. Source-linked output makes that a fifteen minute check per lease instead of a re-read, but somebody still has to sign off before the data becomes the system of record. For due diligence timelines specifically, see lease abstraction for due diligence.
How Leaseabstracts fits an MRI workflow
Upload the executed lease and every amendment. The AI reads the full document set and produces a structured abstract with each field linked to the page and clause it came from and a confidence score showing where to look first. Your administrator reviews, corrects anything, and exports to Excel or CSV.
From there the clean data loads into MRI, and the dates flow into a critical dates register your team works from. Because you keep the exported files, the abstracts stay yours if you ever change platforms, which is not true of data that only exists inside a subscription. Teams comparing dedicated systems can start from our lease management software guide.
WHAT WE EXTRACT
Every lease term, source-linked
FAQ
Common questions
What is MRI lease abstraction?
MRI lease abstraction is pulling the operative terms out of a commercial lease and entering them into MRI Software so the platform can bill rent, calculate recoveries, and track critical dates. MRI stores and calculates on the data but the abstracting happens upstream first, done by a person, an outsourced team, or an AI extraction tool whose output a reviewer approves.
Does MRI Software do lease abstraction?
Yes. MRI markets AI lease abstraction software, and MRI Contract Intelligence is the extraction product built from LEVERTON, the AI document extraction company MRI acquired in July 2019. It is licensed and implemented as part of the enterprise stack, which is why teams with an immediate batch of leases often use a self-serve tool upstream instead.
How do I import lease data into MRI?
Abstract each lease into structured fields, review them, and export to Excel or CSV in the shape your MRI configuration expects, then import or copy the values into the lease record. Because a source-linked abstract lets you click any value and land on the clause behind it, you can verify each field before it reaches your system of record.
How long does it take to abstract a lease for MRI?
Manual abstraction and keying runs roughly one to three hours per lease depending on length and amendment count. Outsourced abstraction typically returns a batch in two to five business days. AI extraction produces the draft abstract in minutes, and the remaining work is a review pass, which source-linking usually keeps to fifteen to thirty minutes per lease.
Can it handle scanned leases and amendment chains?
Yes, and both are worth testing with your own worst file rather than a demo document. Scanned originals need OCR, and accuracy varies with scan quality. Amendments matter more: a lease abstracted without its later amendments will report a rent that three documents have since replaced, so the full document set has to be read together and the controlling term surfaced.
Do I need an enterprise contract to abstract leases for MRI?
Not for the abstraction step. Leaseabstracts is self-serve with published per-plan pricing, and it exports files you own, so you can produce MRI-ready lease data without licensing an extraction module or sitting through an implementation. You would want the enterprise route when portfolio-wide workflow, approvals, and multi-entity reporting are the actual purchase.
Is my lease data secure?
Leases are uploaded over an encrypted connection and processed for your account only. Because the abstract exports to files you keep, the data does not have to live permanently in a third-party system, which is usually the first question legal asks when documents leave the building.
MRI lease abstraction: MRI software lease abstraction and lease data, in minutes
Upload a lease, review a source-linked abstract, and export to a spreadsheet you own.