Common area maintenance charges pay for everything the mall runs collectively — housekeeping, security, HVAC for the common areas, lifts and escalators, landscaping, the works. Every tenant pays a share, and nearly every tenant, at some point, suspects the share is wrong. The suspicion is rational: CAM is often billed as one opaque rate per square foot, reconciled late or never, with the working held in a spreadsheet only one person understands.
Structure the costs before you argue about them
- Cost pools: group expenses into defined pools — soft services, hard services, utilities, security, marketing where the lease routes it through CAM — so every rupee lands somewhere nameable.
- Allocation basis per pool: chargeable area is the default, but some pools legitimately allocate differently — HVAC by connected load or conditioned area, some services to specific zones only. The basis belongs in writing, per pool.
- Exclusions and caps: leases carry CAM caps, category concessions and excluded cost types. These are lease terms, and they must be applied per tenant automatically, not remembered.
Bill on-account monthly, reconcile annually
The workable rhythm is a budgeted monthly on-account charge, then an annual reconciliation against actuals: actual pool costs, each tenant's share under its own lease terms, netted against what was billed, producing a recovery or credit with the full working attached. The reconciliation statement should let a tenant drill from their total down to pool level and from pool level to the cost lines behind it. Then give the process a formal dispute window — queries logged, investigated and answered inside a defined period — so disagreement has a channel that is not a rent withhold.
What this does to recovery rates
Malls under-recover CAM for boring reasons: budgets never trued up, concessions applied ad hoc, units re-measured but never re-billed, escalations missed. A system that computes CAM from the same lease register and area data that everything else runs on closes those leaks by construction — and a tenant who can see the working pays with far less friction. CuroCentral's CAM module was built exactly this way: pools, per-pool bases, per-lease terms, monthly on-account, drillable annual reconciliation, managed disputes.