OSCRE (Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate) has announced the publication of the Lease Abstract Exchange, Version 2 (LSAB v2.0) which extends OSCRE's vendor-neutral language and framework for abstracting commercial leases by now providing a capability for exporting and importing abstracts of 'Green Leases'.
Green Lease contracts and templates incorporate energy and water efficiency, emissions reduction, waste minimization and other sustainability objectives throughout the entire commercial leasing process. They are published by a number of organizations, many of which participated in this initiative. Green Leases typically include new requirements for materials, processes, recordkeeping, and reporting associated with sustainable management practices, environmentally renewable materials and reduced or offset resource usage.
LSAB v2.0 workgroup members Virtual Premise, Bricsnet, IREM, Archidata, TRIRIGA, BOMA, Intuit, TIAA-CREF, Public Works & Government Services Canada, GSA, Caswell Consulting, RealPAC, and The Green Lease Task Force, revised existing elements and added new elements to the specification.
"Inquiries from Virtual Premise customers and prospects alike about best practices and methods for managing the green aspects of their real estate leases are increasing exponentially," said Andy Thomas, President and COO of Virtual Premise.
"This is clearly a market need for which OSCRE is again leading the charge with the new green lease data exchange specifications. We are pleased to continue our active support of the organization's work, especially in this important new area of commercial real estate. OSCRE's electronic exchange standards will ensure a high level of visibility into critical 'green' data that will help companies make better decisions about their sustainable initiatives."
LSAB v2.0 supports the exchange of a condensed summary of a complete lease document among brokers, parties to leases, portfolio managers and other stakeholders. It is focused on corporate and investment owners and individual tenants requiring day-to-day usage of lease information; i.e. interchange of lease abstract data among ERP financial accounting and lease administration systems.
"As environmental issues grow in importance for our clients and for real estate organizations in general, the inclusion of sustainability information in the OSCRE lease standard is an important step forward. Bricsnet is pleased to have been part of the process, and looks forward to implementing the new standard with our customer base," stated David W. Karpook, Vice President, Product Development.
OSCRE has now extended the applicability of the standard to an emerging new lease class. OSCRE's exchange standards do not replace existing lease administration applications or lease contract templates. Instead, the standard provides an open, vendor-neutral XML Schema for use in conjunction with leasing templates, lease abstracting forms, and lease administration applications published by others. The specification may be reviewed and downloaded from www.oscre.org.
Source: OSCRE
