Multi-Location Shopify Merchant? You May Be Overpaying CAM at Every Store
If you run several physical stores, you get a CAM (Common Area Maintenance) reconciliation for each one every year — the "additional rent" that covers the center's shared costs, billed monthly as an estimate and then trued up at year-end. No owner hand-checks ten or twenty of these against ten or twenty leases. So they get paid. And according to Tango Analytics (2023), roughly 40% of CAM reconciliations contain material errors. Across a store portfolio, that's where real money quietly leaks.
Do multi-location retailers overpay CAM?
Often, yes — and they rarely catch it. Every store in a multi-tenant center pays an annual CAM reconciliation, and ~40% carry material errors. The structural problem for an omnichannel or franchise operator is volume: one finance person cannot read every lease, match it to every statement, and verify the math — every year, across every location. The default is to pay.
Why do small CAM errors compound across stores?
Because the same mistake repeats at every location. A 3–5% overcharge on one store is a few hundred to a few thousand dollars — easy to shrug off. But multiply it across a portfolio and a multi-year look-back, and it becomes tens of thousands. You can estimate the dollars at stake for a single store with our free calculator, then multiply by your store count to feel the portfolio exposure. The portfolio, not any one statement, is the number that matters.
What's the most common overcharge across a store portfolio?
An overstated building denominator. Your CAM share is your store's rentable square footage divided by the building's total — so if the landlord understates the building size, your percentage, and every CAM dollar at that store, goes up. This is the most common CAM overcharge, and because retail landlords reuse lease language across their centers, the same denominator issue can show up at several of your locations at once.
How can you check all your store locations at once?
Use a bulk cross-check. ReCAM's free Cross-Check lets you paste your portfolio — one row per location — and screens each store's pro-rata math, cross-checked against independent public data (county building size, market CAM benchmarks), with no upload and no sign-up. It flags which stores carry potential red flags for review and estimates the portfolio dollars at stake. It's a CAM cross-check, not an audit — the fast first pass that tells you which locations are worth a closer look.
What should you do when a store's CAM looks off?
Act within your records-review window. Most leases give you a limited window after the reconciliation to request the landlord's supporting documentation — miss it and you may waive the right. For flagged stores, the $99 Pro cross-check reviews that lease and statement line-by-line against county building data and prior years. A traditional CAM audit runs ~$2,500–$15,000 per property (or auditors take 25–33% of any recovery); the cross-check is the free-to-$99 first step. Informational only — take any discrepancy to your own attorney or CAM auditor.
The takeaway: at one store a CAM error is an annoyance; across a portfolio it's a budget line. Screen them all at once, free, and spend the deeper review only where it's warranted.
Start the free CAM cross-check →
Informational only; not legal advice and not an audit or attest service. ReCAM is not a CPA firm and these services are not regulated by the Texas State Board of Public Accountancy. © ReCAM Technologies LLC.