Accurait Gives Customers More Accurate Leasing Data with Amazon Textract

Commercial real estate leases are often complex and challenging to navigate; a single lease can include hundreds of pages of data on commencement and expiration, maintenance, and other terms and conditions. Founded in 2005, Australia-based Accurait is dedicated to simplifying lease management through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). It was acquired in November 2021 by FLNT, a data-to-¬decision company for commercial real estate. The acquisition has improved decision-making globally for businesses of all sizes, by combining AI-driven lease management software and a data aggregator platform that interprets and visualizes more than 1 million data series at speed. 

Accurait provides lease abstraction and management solutions, including an AI-driven lease data extraction tool. The tool automatically extracts details from scanned lease documents into a centralized, searchable database and allows customers to export that data into other management platforms. 

As customer demand for Accurait grew, the company began experiencing issues with the optical character recognition (OCR) software behind its solution. The software ran from an on-premises data center, causing performance and scalability challenges. Mick Singh, head of product at Accurait, says, “The OCR software was slowing down our servers, which reduced the speed of our abstraction process, leading to longer processing times and delays in extracting information from larger numbers of documents.”

Data transferred from the OCR software was often inaccurate, due to the software’s inability to detect and recognize unclear text and handwriting. Singh adds, “Inaccurate data impacts customers who need to make long-term business decisions about leases. Customers also need updated data to create profit and loss reporting statements, so accuracy is crucial.”

To improve the performance and accuracy of its lease abstraction process, Accurait migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS). “We’ve used AWS for several years to support servers and databases and were confident that AWS could offer the right solution,” says Singh. 

Accurait replaced its existing OCR software with Amazon Textract, an ML service that extracts scanned text, handwriting, and data from various document formats such as PDFs. Amazon Textract uses AI to detect and identify relevant data on each page, accelerating text scanning and extraction. 

Accurait deployed a new version of its data extraction tool on Amazon Textract, from proof of concept to production, in just three months. “We evaluated other offerings, but Amazon Textract was superior in terms of features and integration with our existing AWS environment,” says Singh. Furthermore, with Amazon Textract, Accurait pays only for what it uses, avoiding annual subscriptions and minimum fees. Since making the switch, the company estimates it has saved approximately 25 percent of annual expenses. 

Scanning time is another area that has seen significant improvement. “Previously, scanning an 80-page lease into Accurait took about two minutes. With Amazon Textract, that process has been reduced to 30 seconds,” says Singh. Additionally, Accurait is extracting more accurate data as Amazon Textract identifies handwriting that previously would have been illegible.