REA.co Real Estate Accounting & Tax

Full-service monthly MRI accounting for scaling commercial property managers.

MRI treats lease administration and CAM billing as separate modules, which works well until a lease is abstracted in one and billed from another. Commercial owners running mixed portfolios in MRI often don't discover that disconnect until the annual CAM true-up, when a full year of expense allocations gets reconciled against clauses nobody re-checked at year one.

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Commercial Real Estate Accounting Inside MRI

What Changes When You Run This Vertical On This Platform

Where it breaks

Lease abstraction and CAM billing drifting apart

In MRI, a lease gets abstracted into the lease administration module: base year, expense stops, exclusions, gross-up language, cap structure. CAM billing pulls from a separate recurring-charge setup that references that abstraction but doesn't enforce it. If a clause is entered as a flat cap when the lease actually specifies a cumulative cap, or an exclusion category is missed, the monthly CAM charge still posts and looks normal. Nothing breaks the ledger. The gap surfaces once a year, at true-up, when actual expenses get compared against what tenants were billed, and by then it may cover twelve months across multiple tenants.

How REA handles it

Tracing every CAM charge back to its clause

REA's MRI engagements are commercial-weighted, so we treat the lease administration module as the audit trail for every CAM charge, not just the record of intent. Before a true-up runs, we pull the abstracted terms (base year, stops, exclusions, cap type) and check them line by line against what the recurring-charge module actually billed, rather than trusting that the two stayed in sync. Where MRI's own configuration doesn't flag a mismatch, we do. On mixed commercial and residential portfolios we also confirm CAM logic isn't being applied to units it was never written for.

What we check in your MRI instance

  • Base year figures match the original lease
  • Expense stops match between abstraction and billing
  • Exclusion categories carried through to recurring charges
  • Cap type set correctly, not defaulted to flat
  • CAM pools not mixing residential and commercial units

The Full Scope of the Engagement

Two Pages Carry the Detail

This page covers what is specific to running Commercial Real Estate books in MRI. 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

MRI Bookkeeping

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

See the MRI 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

Handed over the whole accounting function

I highly recommend Real Estate Accounting (REA) services from this group. They truly are great and have helped us tremendously at a time we needed it the most. I felt very comfortable giving up all my accounting responsibilities to this team and I'm still glad I made the decision to work with this group. Nothing less than an amazing experience!

TCTracy CollinsProperty Manager

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

230+

Property Accountants

30M+

Commercial Sq. Ft.

Up to 50%

Saved vs In-House

Every month

On-Time Close

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Running Commercial Real Estate On Something Else?

Same Vertical, Different Platform

Frequently Asked Questions

We're moving from a spreadsheet-based CAM process into MRI. What's the biggest risk during that transition?

The risk isn't MRI itself, it's what gets carried over. If lease terms were tracked loosely in spreadsheets, that same looseness gets typed into the abstraction module and then locked in as structured data. MRI will bill exactly what's entered, correctly, even if what's entered doesn't match the lease. Before go-live, every active commercial lease should be re-abstracted against the original document, not against the old spreadsheet.

Our portfolio is mixed, some multifamily, some commercial retail and office. Does MRI handle that well?

MRI is built for exactly that mix, but the CAM logic that makes sense for a retail strip or office building doesn't apply to residential units, and the two shouldn't share a reconciliation pool. We check that commercial CAM allocations are scoped to the commercial rent roll only, and that residential deposit and turnover accounting isn't running through the same workflows built for tenant expense recovery. On MRI specifically, this is a configuration question more than a software limitation.

Every MRI setup we've seen is different. How do you get up to speed on ours specifically?

We don't assume our last MRI engagement tells us how yours is configured. Implementations vary in which modules are live, how lease data flows between them, and what's been customized over time. Before we touch a reconciliation, we map how your instance actually moves a lease clause from abstraction to tenant billing, then test that path against a handful of real leases. That mapping is where most of the setup-specific risk gets found, before it shows up in a CAM true-up.

Ready for Accurate Commercial Real Estate Books in MRI?

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