Property Management is a broad service that consists of three main activities: Leasing, Lease Administration, and Property Maintenance and Preservation.

Lease administration is a department that usually falls under an organization’s real estate department. Lease administration involves, but not limited to: receiving rents from facilities they own and paying rent for the facilities they lease. It has become an integral part of the accounting, administrative, and legal requirements normally associated with a real estate portfolio. Job responsibilities for lease administrators and real estate professionals include: lease review and abstracting, accounting and processing, lease audits, CAM charges, lease renewal options, repairs and maintenance, information management and reporting, occupancy cost analysis, operating expense review, and document storage and maintenance.

Once a lease is in place, lease administrators continue to manage and monitor rental payments, coordinate any tenant alterations, and handle lease amendments when necessary.

Depending on a corporation’s departmental structure, lease administration or lease management can make up just one department under the umbrella of a corporations real estate structure. Other departments may include facilities management, real estate accounting, construction, and property management.

Lease administration can be handled either internally or through outsourcing. The sizes of the organization’s portfolio and the corresponding complexity of creating automated management and accounting systems are factors that influence an organization's decision to perform lease administration in house or to outsource the function.

Property maintenance relates to the upkeep of a property or building and may be a commercial venture through a property maintenance company or a home pastime for example day to day cleaning.

Commercial property maintenance may involve a number of companies and services including a property management company who may look after the entire estate of properties for one particular company. In turn, the management company would employ the services of one or more companies to provide the required property maintenance services.

The services which could be classed as property maintenance are wide ranging and could include many sectors of the maintenance industry such as maintaining air conditioning, plumbing, electrical wiring, roofing, locksmiths, boarding, glazing or refurbishment.

The retail industry, in particular, makes a high usage of property maintenance services, particularly reactive maintenance (also known as response maintenance) since their stores, and in particular flagship stores such as major city centre stores, require the highest standards of maintenance in order that customers continue to purchase goods. If the maintenance of the store is left to lapse then the retail chain often lose trade due to their image being degraded.

Other property maintenance services such as Planned Preventative Maintenance (often known as PPM)and Advantage Property Maintenance Agency of Greenville North Carolina provide an alternate way of encompassing property maintenance, not to rely on reactive maintenance but to plan in works to minimise disruption to the business.

Leasing is a process by which a firm can obtain the use of a certain fixed assets for which it must pay a series of contractual, periodic, tax deductible payments.

The lessee is the receiver of the services or the assets under the lease contract and the lessor is the owner of the assets. The relationship between the tenant and the landlord is called a tenancy, and can be for a fixed or an indefinite period of time (called the term of the lease). The consideration for the lease is called rent. A gross lease is when the tenant pays a flat rental amount and the landlord pays for all property charges regularly incurred by the ownership from lawnmowers and washing machines to handbags and jewellry.^[1]

Under normal circumstances, a freehold owner of property is at liberty to do what they want with their property, including destroy it or hand over possession of the property to a tenant. However, if the owner has surrendered possession to another (the tenant) then any interference with the quiet enjoyment of the property by the tenant in lawful possession is unlawful.

Similar principles apply to real property as well as to personal property, though the terminology would be different. Similar principles apply to sub-leasing, that is the leasing by a tenant in possession to a sub-tenant. The right to sub-lease can be expressly prohibited by the main lease.