The 2026 leasing market is the busiest in seven years. Q1 logged the highest signed-lease volume since 2018, about 120 million square feet nationally. Tech-sector demand rose 109% year-over-year. AI firms alone signed 415,000 square feet in a single quarter, roughly half of what they took in all of 2025. Manhattan, San Francisco, and Dallas are leading.
Sources: CoStar, Commercial Observer, Allwork.
If your team is signing leases right now, you are also accumulating something else: a backlog of unstructured documents that nobody has time to abstract.
Speed of signing is speed of accumulation
I've been inside three rapid expansion cycles in my career. The portfolios that came out the other side in a clean state were the ones where structure was built into the deal flow as it happened. The ones that emerged messy were the ones where the team told itself it would abstract the leases when things slowed down. Things didn't slow down. The files got deeper. The context behind each deal became harder to reconstruct over time, even for the people still on the team. By the time anyone tried to reassemble the portfolio for a renewal decision or an audit, the cost of rebuilding was higher than the cost of doing it once at execution would have been.
This isn't a process complaint. It's a structural pattern. In stable portfolios, the work of abstracting leases catches up with the rate of new signings. In expansion cycles, it doesn't. The longer the lull never comes, the wider the gap gets.
The cost is invisible until it isn't
A lease that hasn't been abstracted still works for paying rent. The invoice arrives, AP processes it, the landlord gets paid. Nothing breaks. The cost lives elsewhere. It shows up in decisions that depend on knowing what's actually in the lease.
Renewal negotiations are the most expensive instance. Twelve months out, a team should be assembling a comp set, modeling the cost of staying versus leaving, and reading renewal options against current market conditions. If the deal terms have never been structured, that assembly takes months instead of weeks, and the negotiation starts late. Late negotiations produce worse outcomes than well-prepared ones, every time.
Service charge audits are the second instance. Recovering overpayments requires reading the executed lease against billed invoices, line by line, across the term. A team that has never structured the lease cannot run that audit at scale. The recoveries that should be sitting in a pipeline never get found.
Diligence is the third. When a transaction, a strategic pivot, or a reorg puts lease data under review, the team has weeks to produce a coherent portfolio view. If the underlying documents are unstructured, that view either gets fabricated in a panic or gets outsourced at consulting rates. Either path costs significantly more than the equivalent structure built at execution would have.
What's different this cycle
Volume and pace. AI-sector tenants in particular are signing space at a rate that didn't exist before, in markets where landlord leverage is shifting fast. The same operational debt that quietly accumulated in past expansion cycles will accumulate again. Only faster, and at higher absolute volume, because the deals are bigger and the markets are tighter.
The teams that handle this well in 2026 will be the ones that treat lease structuring as part of the execution workflow, not as a back-office task to catch up on later. That means: as each lease executes, the negotiated terms get parsed and entered into a system that can be queried six months later by someone who wasn't on the original deal team. Critical dates, escalation schedules, abatement caps, audit rights, restoration clauses. Encoded as data, not stored as PDFs.
The teams that don't will repeat the pattern. By the time the cycle slows, and cycles do slow, the file rooms will be full of leases nobody has time to read.
That's the gap UseSuelo is built to close. The leasing boom is real and worth participating in. The data debt it's building is also real, and worth not accumulating.