Helping Modernise a 350-Year Old Business: How Grosvenor Is Reviewing Leases Faster With Real Estate-Specific AI

"Some of our leases are time-consuming to review. What used to be a lengthy process is now completed in minutes with Orbital Copilot, with greater confidence and less risk."

Andy Doyle, Director of Operations, Innovation & Strategy, Grosvenor 

About Grosvenor 

Grosvenor is a nearly 350-year-old international organisation with a world-class property portfolio, including the iconic London estates of Mayfair and Belgravia. In London’s West End alone, its UK property business supports over 1,000 businesses and tens of thousands of residents and workers daily.

The Opportunity

Grosvenor’s building surveyors and asset managers handle hundreds of lease-related tasks annually, including licence-to-alter reviews and service charge analysis. These often involve navigating old, handwritten leases that are difficult to interpret. 

Accessing key property details was slow and inefficient, making proactive portfolio management a persistent challenge.

The manual burden of reviewing leases was significant, often taking 20–30 minutes per individual document. This in turn made larger projects like estate-wide reviews costly without legal outsourcing.

Grosvenor’s innovation team was also exploring ways to modernise their workflows, while maintaining strict standards for data privacy, compliance, and security.

The solution: Orbital Copilot 

Grosvenor deployed Orbital Copilot to automate lease reviews across their estate, quickly proving value through significant time savings, clearer analysis and a more efficient, explainable workflow.

"Orbital Copilot supports our teams to access information more efficiently, with the ability to reference the citations as needed."

Rennae Du, Innovation Coordinator at Grosvenor

Grosvenor’s innovation team further collaborated with Orbital to:

• ✅ Enable TIFF-to-PDF conversion, unblocking access to hundreds of legacy scanned documents
• ✅ Create bespoke reporting templates to automate extraction of key clauses from thousands of leases
• ✅ Build batch-upload and review workflows to power estate-wide initiatives, such as their recent sinking fund review

‍"The speed at which Orbital implemented feedback was remarkable. After requesting TIFF support, the functionality was implemented and deployed within weeks. This reflects a genuine and effective partnership for us."

Rennae Du, Innovation Coordinator at Grosvenor

The Impact

In addition to major daily workflow improvements, the time and cost savings of Orbital Copilot enabled projects that were previously considered unviable for Grosevenor to be progressed and achieved. 

• ✅ Faster lease review: review time dropped from 20-30 minutes to under 5 minutes, on average. A saving they also evidenced across a range of use cases
• ✅ Accurate document analysis: Orbital Copilot’s proprietary OCR technology could interpret historic, calligraphic leases, providing Grosvenor with a key capability that most tools struggled with
• ✅ Legal costs reduced: whilst legal reviews remain an important function, teams are empowered to self-serve for understanding low risk due diligence tasks
• ✅ Confidence in the results increased: thanks to clear citations and document traceability 
• ✅ Unlocked previously unviable strategic projects: a sinking fund review project–previously deprioritised due to time and cost–became possible for Grosvenor to undertake

"We wouldn't have even attempted the sinking fund project without Orbital Copilot, now it’s possible—and cost effective."

The Result

By deploying real estate-specific legal AI with Orbital Copilot, Grosvenor has transformed a long-standing operational challenge into a scalable, strategic advantage. This shift has enabled a more proactive approach to portfolio management while freeing teams to focus on higher-value work.