A CAM audit checks your landlord's reconciliation for billing errors across 14 categories. Errors appear in 40% of statements. Here's what tenants find.
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Find My OverchargesSee a sample report firstA common area maintenance audit (CAM audit) is a forensic review of your landlord's annual CAM reconciliation statement. It verifies that every charge billed to you falls within the limits and categories your lease permits.
CAM audit: A CAM audit is a forensic review of a commercial landlord's annual common area maintenance reconciliation statement that verifies every charge against the specific provisions of the tenant's executed lease. The audit checks 14 overcharge categories including management fee caps, pro-rata share denominators, capital expense exclusions, gross-up violations, and CAM cap compliance.
Tango Analytics (2023) found material errors in 40% of commercial reconciliations. PredictAP estimates $15 billion in annual overcharges go unrecovered each year across U.S. commercial real estate. You are probably paying more than your lease requires. The question is how much.
30% of CAM statements contain billing errors (Springbord Research, 2024)
40% of commercial CAM reconciliations contain material errors (Tango Analytics, 2023)
You don't need a professional auditor to find these errors. You need the right analysis against your specific lease, run against the actual numbers your landlord submitted.
Use this guide if you need to answer one of three questions quickly:
If you already want to inspect the finished output, open the sample report. If you want to test your own lease and reconciliation first, start your free audit. Not sure if an audit is worth it for your lease? Take the free 2-minute assessment to find out.
Most CAM errors are systematic, not accidental. Wrong pro-rata denominators, management fees calculated on inflated bases, capital projects buried in operating expenses: these patterns repeat year after year until someone catches them. For a full breakdown of what CAM charges include and the seven most common overcharge categories, start with the CAM charges guide. The problem is that landlords prepare the reconciliation and tenants typically receive only a summary. Without running the underlying math against the lease, the errors stay hidden.
Here's what running a CAM audit actually gives you:
You find out whether errors exist before committing to a dispute. The free scan shows your total potential recovery and finding count before you pay anything. If nothing turns up, you have confirmation your billing is clean. Before investing time in any dispute, some tenants first assess whether the commercial lease dispute is worth pursuing given the overcharge size, remaining lease term, and their relationship with the landlord.
You get the specific numbers you need to dispute. Effective dispute letter drafts don't just assert overcharges. They cite the lease provision, show the calculation, and quantify the difference. CAMAudit generates that document pre-populated with your data.
You recover from prior years, not just the current one. Most leases give tenants audit rights covering 1 to 3 prior years. State contract law may extend that further. A single review can surface recovery from multiple billing periods.
You audit at the beginning, not after the dispute window closes. Most leases give tenants 30 to 180 days after statement delivery to challenge errors. Waiting is costly. For a comparison of tools that can help, see the CAM audit software guide. For small business tenants who have never audited before, that guide covers how to approach the process when in-house accounting capacity is limited. If your goal is to understand what professional CAM audit services look like and what to look for when evaluating them, that comparison covers the evaluation criteria. For tenants who want a quick result before engaging anyone, instant online CAM audit tools deliver findings in minutes from a document upload.
You know your actual cost basis before lease renewal. CAM charges that compounded incorrectly for three years become the baseline for the next term if you don't catch them. For what to do once findings are confirmed, see what happens after a CAM audit finds overcharges.
For a visual overview of the full process, see how it works. The short version:
"When I started building CAMAudit, I assumed most errors would be accidental. After testing against reconciliation samples from published litigation and audit records, the management fee calculation errors appear too consistently to be coincidence. Landlords billing 5% when the lease says 3% is not a rounding issue." — Angel Campa, Founder of CAMAudit
Key takeaway: A CAM audit verifies that every charge on your landlord's reconciliation falls within your lease limits, and material errors appear in 40% of statements across U.S. commercial properties.
CAMAudit runs 14 deterministic detection rules on every audit. These are the same methodologies a trained human auditor would apply:
"The free scan shows the total potential recovery before you pay anything. If CAMAudit finds nothing, you get a CAM Verified certificate. The break-even is recovering about $200 in overcharges, and on any lease with $5,000 or more in annual CAM, even a 4% error clears that threshold." — Angel Campa, Founder of CAMAudit
A few situations where running an audit is worth it:
Break-even: At $79 for one audit, any annual CAM bill over $5,000 makes CAMAudit worth running. Tango Analytics (2023) found material errors in 40% of reconciliations, and PredictAP estimates $15 billion in annual overcharges go unrecovered across U.S. commercial real estate.
A CAM audit focuses specifically on the common area maintenance reconciliation: operating expenses and the tenant's pro-rata share. A lease audit is broader and encompasses all financial obligations under the lease.
What a lease audit examines beyond CAM:
Real estate tax allocation. A lease audit verifies that only taxes attributable to the property are included (not related entity taxes), that California Proposition 13 reassessment charges are properly handled where applicable, and that tax refunds and credits are passed through to tenants proportionally.
Insurance pass-throughs. Coverage types billed should match what the lease permits. Policy premiums should be allocated correctly among tenants, and landlord-retained insurance commissions should not be included in billed premiums.
Operating expense escalations. For modified gross and full-service leases with expense stops or base years, the base year must have been established at a stabilized occupancy level, and year-over-year increases must comply with any CAM cap.
For NNN leases, a lease audit and a CAM audit cover most of the same ground because CAM, taxes, and insurance are the three major variable costs. For modified gross leases, the base year and expense stop calculations are additional audit targets not always covered in a pure CAM audit.
When to conduct a lease audit (beyond the annual reconciliation trigger):
The lookback period for a lease audit is governed by two limits that work together. The shorter of the two controls.
Limit 1: Your lease's audit rights provision. Most audit rights clauses specify how many prior years a tenant can request records for. Common windows are one to three years.
Limit 2: The state statute of limitations for written contract claims. Even if your lease's audit rights clause is silent on lookback, state law caps your ability to sue for recovery.
| SOL period | States | Implied audit years |
|---|---|---|
| 3 years | AK, CO, DE, DC, MD, MS, NH, SC | 3 prior years |
| 4 years | CA (CCP § 337), TX (§ 16.004) | 4 prior years |
| 5 years | AR, FL (§ 95.11), ID, KS, NE, OK, VA | 5 prior years |
| 6 years | AL, AZ, CT, HI, ME, MA, MI, MN, NV, NM, ND, NY (CPLR § 213), OR, SD, TN, UT, VT, WA, WI | 6 prior years |
| 8 years | MT | 8 prior years |
| 10 years | IL (735 ILCS 5/13-206), IN, IA, KY, LA, MO, RI, WV, WY | 10 prior years |
Several states apply the discovery rule, which tolls the SOL clock until the tenant discovers the overcharge rather than when it first occurred. A tenant who has never audited may argue the clock started with the first audit, not the first year of billing. This is a fact-specific legal question. Consult an attorney if your lookback window is material to your recovery potential.
Practical implication: A tenant in Illinois on a 10-year-old lease with consistent annual overcharges should audit all 10 prior years simultaneously. Each credit on the CAMAudit platform covers one lease year. The number of credits to purchase equals the number of years within your state's SOL window.
Most commercial leases also include an "audit rights" or "tenant audit" provision giving you the right to request the landlord's books and records for the CAM reconciliation period, engage an independent accountant to review those records, and challenge discrepancies within a specified window. Key negotiated variables in audit rights clauses include the audit window (how long after statement delivery you can initiate an audit), the lookback period (how many prior years you can audit), who pays for the audit if errors above a threshold are found, and whether the landlord must provide records voluntarily or only on formal request.
A lease review identifies what the lease says. A common area maintenance audit verifies whether the landlord's actual billing complies with those terms. Lease reviews are done before signing. CAM audits are done after receiving each annual reconciliation, against real numbers the landlord submitted.
Landlords prepare the reconciliation and tenants typically receive only a summary. Without running the underlying math against the lease, systematic errors go undetected for years. That's not a flaw in the process. It's the design.
Before sending a dispute letter draft, verify each of these items in your reconciliation. A complete CAM reconciliation audit guide covers all 14 overcharge categories with step-by-step instructions.
If you are still deciding whether this is worth the effort, do these two things in order:
The free scan answers the real BOFU question: "Is there enough money in my lease and reconciliation to justify action?"
What is a CAM audit?
A CAM audit is a forensic review of your landlord's annual CAM reconciliation statement. It checks whether the charges billed match what your lease actually permits, covering management fees, pro-rata share, excluded expenses, cap provisions, and 12 other categories. Springbord Research reports that 30% of CAM statements contain errors, and Tango Analytics (2023) found material errors in 40% of commercial reconciliations. CAMAudit runs the full 14-rule analysis in under 15 minutes for $79, versus 4 to 8 weeks and $3,000 to $15,000 for a traditional audit firm.
How long does a CAM audit take?
CAMAudit delivers results in under 15 minutes from upload. Traditional audit firms take 4 to 8 weeks from engagement to final report.
How much does a CAM audit cost?
CAMAudit charges $79 for 1 audit, $199 for 3, or $299 for 5. Traditional audit firms charge $2,500 to $15,000 per property plus 30 to 33% contingency on amounts recovered. The math works in CAMAudit's favor for any tenant with an annual CAM bill over $5,000.
What documents do I need for a CAM audit?
Two PDFs: your commercial lease agreement (or the relevant lease addendum covering CAM) and the annual CAM reconciliation statement from your landlord. Both are required. Without the lease, there's no baseline to check the reconciliation against.
Do I need a professional auditor to dispute CAM charges?
No. Most CAM disputes resolve at the dispute letter draft stage, where a documented claim with specific calculations is what matters. A certified auditor may strengthen your position in litigation, but that's rarely where disputes end up. CAMAudit generates a fully populated dispute letter draft with 50-state legal citations included with every paid audit.
What is the difference between a CAM audit and a lease audit?
A CAM audit focuses specifically on the common area maintenance reconciliation: operating expenses and pro-rata share. A lease audit is broader, covering all financial obligations under the lease including taxes, insurance, base rent escalations, and expense stops. For NNN leases, the two terms cover most of the same ground because CAM, taxes, and insurance are the three major variable costs. For modified gross leases, a full lease audit adds base year and expense stop analysis not always included in a standard CAM review. The lookback period for either type is governed by your lease's audit rights clause and your state's statute of limitations for written contract claims, which ranges from 3 years (Delaware, Maryland) to 10 years (Illinois under 735 ILCS 5/13-206).
