In a triple net lease, you pay your share of the building's taxes, insurance, and common area maintenance (CAM) on top of base rent — and those pass-throughs are where overcharges hide. A lease and CAM audit checks what you were actually billed against what your lease allows. For many South Florida tenants, it's found money.
Why CAM is where the leaks are
Base rent is fixed and easy to check. CAM is variable, broad, and reconciled once a year in a statement most tenants never scrutinize. That's exactly why errors and aggressive billing accumulate there.
What an audit looks for
- Capital expenses disguised as CAM — roof and HVAC replacements, parking-lot repaving, and similar capital items billed as routine operating costs.
- Management and admin fees above market or above your lease's cap.
- Gross-up errors — operating expenses grossed up to full occupancy incorrectly.
- Wrong pro-rata share — your percentage based on the wrong rentable square footage.
- Uncapped increases that should have been limited by your lease.
The process
We start by reading your lease to confirm your audit rights and what's includable, then request and review the landlord's reconciliation and backup, flag discrepancies, and pursue credits or refunds for what was overbilled. Strong audit-rights language makes this far easier — which is also why we negotiate it into leases up front.
Worth it
If you occupy meaningful square footage on an NNN lease, an audit frequently pays for itself many times over — and it sets a precedent that keeps future reconciliations honest.
The median South Florida commercial building was built in 1982
That single fact explains most of what goes wrong in a CAM reconciliation, so it is worth sitting with before anything else.
From my record of every commercial parcel with a building on it across Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach — 76,096 buildings with a recorded construction year — the median was built in 1982. Nearly two thirds predate 1990. Barely one in eighteen has gone up since 2015.
| Built | Buildings | Share of stock |
|---|
| Before 1990 | 48,750 | 64.1% |
| Before 2000 | 54,981 | 72.3% |
| 2015 or later | 4,293 | 5.6% |
Tri-county commercial parcels with a structure and a recorded year built, August 2026. n = 76,096.
A building in its forties is at the exact point in its life where the roof, the chillers, the parking lot, the elevator and the electrical service all come due at once. Every one of those is a capital expense. Under most leases, capital replacements are the landlord's cost, recoverable only as an amortized amount over the useful life of the item, if at all.
What lands in the reconciliation is often a different story. A $180,000 roof replacement appears as "roof repairs and maintenance" and gets billed to the tenants in a single year. The building is old, the work is real, and the invoice exists — which is why nobody questions it. The question is not whether the money was spent. It is whether your lease says you pay for it.
This is the single most common finding in the reconciliations I look at, and it is almost never fraud. It is a property manager coding an invoice quickly in a building where the distinction was never enforced.
Where the money usually is
Capital dressed as maintenance
The one described above, and typically the largest by dollar value. Roof, HVAC replacement, parking lot resurfacing, elevator modernization, exterior painting on a cycle. The test is whether the work extends the useful life of a building system or merely maintains it. If your lease permits amortization, the correct treatment is your share of the annual amortized amount over the item's life — not the whole invoice in one year.
Administrative and management fees stacked on each other
Many leases cap the management fee at a percentage of gross receipts or of operating expenses. It is common to find a management fee and a separate administrative fee doing the same job, or a fee calculated on a base that includes items your lease excludes. Fees on fees is a real category.
Expenses from outside your building
In a multi-building park under one ownership, costs get allocated across the portfolio. Landscaping for a building you cannot see, security for a lot you do not use, a shared management office. Some of that is legitimately shared and some of it is allocation drift.
Insurance and taxes without the underlying bill
Florida insurance has moved sharply enough that this line now carries real weight, and a large increase is entirely plausible on its face. That is precisely why it is worth seeing the actual policy declaration and the actual tax bill rather than a figure on a statement. On the tax side, a successful assessment appeal by the landlord should flow through to you; it does not always.
Base-year contamination
In a base-year lease you pay increases over a benchmark year. If the base year was artificially low — the building was half empty, or a large expense category was not yet running — every subsequent year overstates your increase. This one compounds, so it is worth catching early in a term rather than late.
When an audit is worth doing
Honesty about scale matters here, because a review costs time and I would rather tell you not to bother than take on something that cannot pay for itself.
The math is simple. Operating expenses in South Florida commonly run somewhere in the range of $6 to $14 per square foot depending on asset type, building age and structure. On 3,000 square feet, a 10% error is a few thousand dollars — real money, and usually worth an hour of reading, not a formal audit. On 25,000 square feet in a multi-tenant office building with a decades-old mechanical plant, the same error rate is a different conversation entirely, and the correction usually repeats every year afterwards because the treatment gets fixed going forward.
The strongest candidates share a profile: a triple-net or base-year structure, more than about 10,000 square feet, a building old enough to be replacing systems, a reconciliation that jumped without explanation, or a landlord who has recently changed. If two or more of those describe you, it is worth a look.
The weakest candidate is a small suite in a gross lease where you pay a flat number and the landlord absorbs the operating costs. There is nothing to reconcile. If that is you, the money is in the renewal rate, not in the expense line.
How I approach it, and what I am not
I start with your lease, not with the statement. The lease decides what is permissible; the statement only tells you what was billed. Reading them in the other order is how people end up arguing about invoices that were always going to be chargeable.
From there it is the reconciliation itself, the prior two or three years for the trend, the pro-rata calculation and the denominator behind it, and then supporting documentation for anything that moved sharply or looks structural rather than operational. Where something is wrong, the goal is a credit and a corrected treatment going forward, which is usually worth more than the one-year recovery.
I am a broker, not an accountant, an attorney or a certified auditor. What I do is a commercial review by someone who reads these leases for a living and knows what is market in these buildings. If the numbers warrant a formal forensic audit or a legal claim, I will tell you and help you engage the right person — and if I think you should leave it alone, I will tell you that too.
The other thing worth saying plainly: raising this well does not have to damage the relationship. Most landlords correct a genuine miscoding without drama when it is raised as a question rather than an accusation. Handling it that way is part of the job, particularly if you intend to stay in the building.
