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Lease abstraction turns a commercial lease (and related amendments) into a structured summary your team can review and use operationally — terms, dates, options, co-tenancy, CAM (common area maintenance) language, and other fields your workspace is configured to capture. Hugo is the agent that runs the workflow. If you are new to Surfaice, read What is Surfaice? and Skills first.

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Before you start

  • You need access to a workspace with the lease-abstraction skill enabled.
  • Prefer uploading or pointing Hugo at the authoritative PDF your team already files in SharePoint or your document management system.
  • Confirm exclusion lists and connector scopes with IT if the packet includes sensitive side letters.

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Typical flow

1

Open the skill or ask Hugo

Start lease abstraction from the skills UI, or ask Hugo to abstract a specific lease document.
2

Provide the source documents

Attach the lease PDF and relevant amendments. Include exhibits only when they affect commercial terms you care about.
3

Review field-by-field

Check dates, rent, options, co-tenancy, and landlord obligations. Prefer fields that cite page or clause references.
4

Correct and save

Fix errors in review. Save only the accepted abstract into the workspace or write back to your lease admin system if that path is enabled for your tenant.
Treat the first pass as a draft. High accuracy on standard retail leases still requires human review before downstream reporting or landlord correspondence.

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Tips for better abstracts

  • Use clean scans or native PDFs when possible. Scanned retail leases are supported, but low-quality scans may miss fields — compare to the signed PDF.
  • Include amendments in chronological order.
  • Tell Hugo which field set your team uses (for example “JD retail abstract fields”) if multiple templates exist.
  • Ask follow-ups like “quote the exclusive-use clause with page number” when a field looks incomplete.
  • Say transcribe only if you need OCR Markdown before abstraction.

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Scanned leases

Many tenants work from image-only PDFs. Hugo can transcribe and abstract them, but:
  • Run ocr-transcription first when you need searchable text without field extraction
  • Expect extra review time on handwritten riders and stamp overlays
  • Ask which files were read if a portfolio folder contains hundreds of scans