Overview

Landlord & portfolio management

Platforms including MRI Software, Yardi Systems, Re-Leased, VTS, and Visual Lease were built to serve asset owners. They track leases already in portfolio, model valuations, manage tenant contacts and renewals, and ensure compliance with lease accounting standards (IFRS 16, ASC 842). They look backwards at the managed estate, not forwards at the live deal. They have no occupier relationship and no transaction functionality.

Data & market intelligence

CoStar, Argus Enterprise, Fifth Dimension, Findable, and Proda supply pricing data, comparable evidence, market analytics, and — increasingly — AI-assisted lease document extraction. They inform the decisions that surround a deal but do not participate in its execution. At best they are decision-support; the actual transaction happens outside their walls.

Transaction & legal tools

Orbital, tracesolutions, Dealpath, Harvey, Luminance, Legl, and DocuSign each own a specific step of the deal: managing the legal workflow, routing contracts for signature, tracking deal milestones, or onboarding client due diligence. They are point solutions — they serve one party (typically the solicitor or the agent) and one moment. No single tool follows the deal across its full arc from negotiation through completion.

Occupier-side tools

Occupier (the company) is the most direct attempt to serve the tenant side of the market. It provides a US-built SaaS platform for occupiers managing existing lease portfolios: flagging renewal dates, tracking commitments, reporting on lease costs. Like landlord tools, it looks primarily at what has already been agreed rather than what is being negotiated. It is a portfolio tracker with some transaction awareness, not an execution layer.

Harla does not attempt to own the entire CRE leasing stack from day one. Its market entry follows a deliberate three-phase sequence — Land, Expand, Compound — each phase building on the customer relationships and data established in the previous one. Understanding this phasing is essential to understanding which competitors are relevant now versus later.

The phased approach means the competitive set Harla faces at entry is narrow and winnable. Phase 1 — the beachhead — is an uncontested space in the UK market: no existing platform extracts structured data from existing leases and presents it in a shared portal for both occupier and agent. Phase 2 competition becomes relevant only once Harla has both parties on-platform and is driving live transactions. The document root-cause is Phase 1; everything else follows.

No existing platform connects these clusters across the full leasing lifecycle. No tool currently guides the landlord and occupier together from first approach through commercial negotiation, heads of terms, legal verification, execution, signature, and handover. The information generated inside the live deal (negotiating positions, timeline, clause movement, party behaviour) is almost entirely unstructured and uncaptured.

This is not a coincidence. The fragmentation is structural: landlord tools are built for asset owners who have no interest in sharing their negotiating position with occupiers; legal tools are built for solicitors who serve one party only; data tools are built for market-level insight, not transaction-level execution. Nobody has approached the problem from the deal itself outwards.

That is the gap Harla occupies: an execution layer that sits at the centre of the transaction, serving both sides, owning every stage — entered through the Phase 1 beachhead of structured lease data and a shared portal.