Lease review is one of the most time-consuming processes in real estate operations. Whether you’re managing 50 assets or 5,000, reviewing leases for key data points like rent schedules, options to renew, escalation clauses, or tenant obligations takes up valuable time, especially when it’s done manually.

Today, AI-powered tools are helping teams move faster and more accurately through lease documents using something called a lease review AI prompt. This blog explains what it is, how it works, and why it’s becoming essential in modern real estate portfolio management.

This post is part of a comprehensive series on AI lease abstraction.

What Is a Lease Review AI Prompt?

A lease review AI prompt is a structured instruction designed to guide an AI model such as GPT-4 or Claude to analyze a lease document and return specific, actionable information. These prompts can ask the AI to:

  • Extract structured data like lease dates, base rent, and renewal terms
  • Summarize entire leases or sections such as escalation clauses
  • Flag missing or unusual language that may require follow-up
  • Generate an abstract formatted for operational use or investor reporting

Rather than building a custom tool or hiring additional staff, teams can use tailored prompts with AI to review documents in minutes instead of hours.

Why Use AI Prompts for Lease Review?

Real estate professionals are increasingly turning to AI for lease review because it eliminates many of the bottlenecks in portfolio and deal analysis.

First, AI is fast. What might take an analyst an hour per lease can be done by an AI tool in under a minute with consistency across all documents. Second, AI prompts can be customized to fit your firm’s exact needs, whether you’re reviewing office leases, multifamily agreements, or industrial portfolios. Third, AI helps teams scale. When reviewing leases for a portfolio acquisition or preparing for quarterly reporting, AI can handle hundreds of documents simultaneously.

According to McKinsey, generative AI could automate as much as 60 to 70 percent of data processing tasks across industries, including real estate, by 2030.

Case Example: Using AI Prompts at Portfolio Scale

A national commercial property firm recently used Kolena’s AI-powered platform to abstract over 3,000 leases across office, retail, and industrial assets. By creating a lease review prompt that extracted 30+ key fields including start and end dates, rent terms, and expense responsibilities they reduced abstraction time by more than 85%.

The team used these outputs to update their internal lease database, flag inconsistencies, and prepare investment reports, all without hiring additional analysts or waiting weeks for results.

How to Write an Effective Lease Review AI Prompt

The power of prompt-based AI tools lies in flexibility. You can tailor prompts to the document type, property class, or desired output format.

Here’s a basic example prompt:


“Extract the lease start date, expiration date, monthly rent, rent escalations, renewal terms, termination rights, and any tenant improvement obligations from this lease.”“Extract the lease start date, expiration date, monthly rent, rent escalations, renewal terms, termination rights, and any tenant improvement obligations from this lease.”

You can also add formatting instructions, such as “Return the results in a JSON table format,” or “Summarize the lease in 3 bullet points.”

Stanford research shows that well-crafted prompts increase AI extraction accuracy dramatically when compared to generic instructions.

Best Practices for Using Lease Review AI Prompts

To get the most out of lease review prompts, keep these practices in mind:

  • Document quality matters. Clean PDFs or Word files will always perform better than scanned or low-resolution images.
  • Iterate your prompts. Start with a simple instruction set, review results, and refine based on what’s missing.
  • Standardize outputs. Use the same prompt structure across similar documents to simplify downstream reporting.
  • Incorporate human checks. While AI can extract with high accuracy, having an analyst review key summaries ensures nothing critical is missed.

Platforms Supporting Prompt-Based Lease Review

Several modern platforms support customizable lease abstraction with AI prompts. Kolena offers purpose-built agents that can be fine-tuned to your workflows without writing code. Other providers like Lexion, Evisort, and Juro offer varying levels of prompt control and AI review automation.

However with Kolena, you don’t need to be an AI expert, just describe what you want in plain English, and the platform automatically generates the optimized prompt for you.

You can try it yourself with Kolena’s Free Lease Abstraction Tool to see how a lease review AI prompt works in practice.

Faster Lease Review Without the Bottlenecks

AI prompts are transforming how real estate and operations teams approach lease review. Instead of relying on manual workflows or rigid templates, teams can now prompt AI agents to do the heavy lifting—saving time, improving data accuracy, and unlocking faster portfolio insights.

As the volume of lease data grows, using AI prompts ensures your team can scale efficiently and stay ahead of reporting deadlines, acquisitions, and asset-level analysis. And with platforms like Kolena, it’s easier than ever to get started.