REA.co Real Estate Accounting & Tax

Full-service monthly Buildium bookkeeping for scaling commercial property managers.

Buildium was built for flat, uniform residential rent, not pro-rata commercial recoveries tied to lease clauses. Commercial owners who run their books there are asking a general ledger to hold base years, expense stops, caps, and escalations it was never designed to track. The gap between what the lease says and what Buildium's recurring charges actually bill shows up once a year, at CAM true-up.

Schedule a Call

Commercial Real Estate Accounting Inside Buildium

What Changes When You Run This Vertical On This Platform

Where it breaks

CAM recoveries drift silently from lease terms

Buildium bills CAM the same way it bills rent: a recurring charge, entered once, that keeps firing until someone changes it. Commercial leases don't work that way. Expense pools shift by category, tenant caps reset annually, exclusions apply differently per lease, and pro-rata shares change when a tenant expands or a building is remeasured. None of that logic lives in a recurring charge. It lives in the lease. Because Buildium has no field that ties a charge back to the clause that authorized it, the recurring charge and the lease quietly diverge, month by month, until the annual reconciliation forces someone to explain a year of small mismatches at once.

How REA handles it

We reconcile the ledger against the lease

We treat the lease abstract as the audit trail, not the recurring charge. Every CAM charge in Buildium gets checked against the clause that authorizes it: base year, expense stops, exclusions, cap percentage, escalation formula. Where Buildium can't hold that logic natively, we track it in a reconciliation workbook tied to each lease, updated the moment a lease is signed, renewed, or amended, not at year end. On instances that also carry residential or association funds, we keep commercial CAM pools in their own tracked accounts, separate from tenant deposits and separate from any HOA reserves, so a true-up never has to untangle whose money paid for what.

What we check in your Buildium instance

  • CAM charges checked against the authorizing lease clause
  • Pro-rata shares reverified after any square footage change
  • Expense exclusions applied per lease, not by default
  • Escalation formulas recalculated on each lease anniversary
  • Commercial recovery pools kept separate from HOA reserves
  • Base year figures traced back to original abstract

The Full Scope of the Engagement

Two Pages Carry the Detail

This page covers what is specific to running Commercial Real Estate books in Buildium. The complete service scope, process, and pricing conversation live on the two pages below.

The vertical

Commercial Real Estate Accounting

Full scope, monthly process, property types, FAQs and the team on the account.

See the Commercial Real Estate page

The platform

Buildium Bookkeeping

What Buildium does well, where its accounting breaks, and how REA works inside your own instance.

See the Buildium page
  1. 01

    Trust Accounting

    Tenant, owner, and security deposit money kept separate, tied out, and ready for a state audit at any time.

  2. 02

    Bank Reconciliation Services

    Every operating, trust, and escrow account reconciled on a fixed schedule, with the variances chased down rather than carried forward.

  3. 03

    Accounts Payable & Receivable

    Vendor invoices coded and paid, tenant receipts applied, management fees taken, and owner distributions cut on time.

  4. 04

    Bookkeeping Cleanup & Catch-Up

    Months or years of unreconciled books diagnosed, corrected, and brought current so the numbers you report are numbers you trust.

  5. 05

    CAM Reconciliation

    Common area maintenance pools built from the lease terms, reconciled against actuals, and billed or credited with a defensible tenant statement.

Experts In All Property Types

Residential, commercial and everything in between. The asset class changes what the books have to prove, and our teams are staffed accordingly.

Check Out What Our Clients Have To Say About Us

Property Managers, Investors & Owner Operators

Client story

Day-to-day financial operations

REA and team have been nothing but excellent helping our firm with its day to day financial needs. Their expertise, professionalism, and timeliness have made our lives so much easier. We foresee a long relationship with REA and team.

BCBrian CookOwner Operator

Onboarding and responsiveness

Real Estate Accounting truly is a special company. They helped as if they were a part of our company, with the concern and caution as an employee would have, but even more. They quickly ascertained our needs and developed an effective team to help with our accounting needs. They were extremely responsive and always accurate. I would recommend their services to anyone who needs help with their property management accounting.

KSKelly StanawayProperty Manager

Smaller portfolio, still looked after

Adam the owner took a personal interest in my situation and was willing to work with me to see if his company was a good fit. I may be too small for them but I would highly recommend them to anyone considering a bookkeeper for their property management business.

TSTrevor SmithProperty Manager

230+

Property Accountants

30M+

Commercial Sq. Ft.

Up to 50%

Saved vs In-House

Every month

On-Time Close

Schedule a Call

Running Commercial Real Estate On Something Else?

Same Vertical, Different Platform

Frequently Asked Questions

We already run our residential portfolio in Buildium. Can we manage a commercial building in the same instance?

Technically, yes. Buildium doesn't stop you from putting a commercial building in the same instance as your residential and association portfolios. The risk isn't the software, it's the chart of accounts. Without dedicated bank sub-accounts and GL codes for the commercial property's CAM pool, tenant deposits, and operating funds, that money sits next to residential trust and HOA reserves with nothing separating them but discipline. We set up that segregation before the first charge posts, not after an audit asks for it.

How does Buildium handle our annual CAM reconciliation?

It doesn't, not on its own. Buildium will total what you billed and what you spent by category, but it has no concept of a base year, an expense cap, or a lease-specific exclusion. Reconciling correctly means pulling the actual GL activity out of Buildium and checking it line by line against each lease's terms, then posting the true-up as a single reviewed adjustment. We do that reconciliation off-platform and bring only the finished entry back into Buildium, so the ledger stays clean and the math stays traceable to the lease.

Our leases have different escalation dates and different CAM caps for every tenant. Can Buildium track that automatically?

No. Buildium's recurring charges will keep billing whatever amount was entered until someone manually changes it, and it has no field that flags when an escalation or a cap is due to change. That tracking has to happen outside the charge itself. We keep a lease-by-lease schedule of every escalation date, cap, and renewal option, and we update the Buildium charge when the schedule says to, not when someone happens to notice the lease is stale.

Ready for Accurate Commercial Real Estate Books in Buildium?

Schedule a call with our team to talk through your Buildium instance, what it is doing to your commercial real estate financials, and what REA would take on.