API Updates

Overview

In our continuing effort to bring the legacy Deal and Portfolio APIs to parity with Next Gen endpoints, this month’s enhancements are focused on making financial information more readily available in Budgets, Deal Terms, and Lease Terms. Users who rely heavily on financial data will now be able to pull the below objects directly from the respective endpoint without having to link back to the financials endpoint with nested IDs. All new fields are returned in a standard format for consistency across the endpoint. As a result, we have deprecated certain fields within the Financials endpoint to maintain consistency with the new objects mentioned.

Additionally, we are introducing a new Next Gen endpoint for Appraisals, which will have the same attributes as Budgets (but not Blended Budgets and Asset) relationships.

New API Features

A new Appraisals endpoint for users who rely heavily on financial modeling and forecasts

In the Deal endpoint added agent phone extension to complete broker information

In the Deal Terms and Budget endpoints, added as objects that our seasoned users will recognize:

• base_rents
• free_rents
• rent_escalations
• percentage_rents
• reimbursable_expenses
• other_incomes
• costs

Note: The attributes above will still be in the response even if there's no data. An empty list will be returned.

In the Deal Terms endpoint only, added remaining_lease_obligations

In the lease terms endpoint, added

• base_rents
• free_rents
• reimbursable_expenses
• commissions
• other_incomes

In the Space endpoint added electrical

In the Assets endpoint, added und

Deprecations

In Budget endpoint,

• tenant_improvements structure
• building_improvements structure
• other_fees structure

In Deal Terms, within the commissions object

• created_at
• updated_at

Upcoming

We anticipate a new Tours endpoint to be available by early April 2023. This will allow users to export tour metadata for enhanced reporting and analytics.

API Updates

Overview / Summary
Enhancements were added to multiple endpoints based on customer feedback and performance analysis. Our current initiative is import nodes from the Legacy Deal Export API so users can have full access to the fields in the Deal Export but with the compartmentalization of the Next Gen APIs.

For this month’s update,, we’ve made additions to Assets, Budgets, Deal Terms, Deal Stages, and Options

We’ve also made backend enhancements that will improve performance and maintainability.

New API Additions

In the Deal Stages endpoint, added EndDate, and description to carryover functionality from our Legacy Deal Export API

In the Deal Term endpoint,
Comparative Lease Term object can be utilized to retrieve:
Commencement Date
Expiration Date
Execution Date
Rentable Size
This will allow legacy users to replicate the Deal Previous Term function in the Legacy Deal Export API

Added npv_per_area and description fields to eliminate the gap between Next Gen and Legacy Deal Export

In the Budgets endpoint, we have carried over legacy fields from the Legacy Deal Export API:

• ProposalType is now exposed as analysis_type
• NEROverride is now exposed as ner_override
• NPVperSqFt is now exposed as npv_per_area
• TotalNPV available as total_deal_value
• LeaseType is available as structure
• MiscDescription available as description
• TotalIncome available as total_rent

The Assets endpoint now exposes

• building_region based on a free-text field in the “Edit Buildings” form in the front-end. This will allow for greater use of free-text fields for reporting and analytics (See reference image below)
• Market field that is associated with the sub-market of a building

• In the Proposal endpoint, added proposal_label to naturally identify proposal names as they’re labeled in the front-end UI
• Deal Terms endpoint now exposes total_commissions as object, eliminating a gap from the Legacy Deal Export API
• In the Options endpoint added created_at and updated_at date fields

Bug Fixes

Internal Server Errors related to pagination have been resolved

Upcoming

Financial data such as Base rent, Percentage rent, Reimbursable expenses, Costs, Other Incomes will be available in the Budgets and Deal Terms endpoints. This will mimic the way the nodes were previously delivered in the Legacy Deal Export API
Nested Financials will be deprecated

API Updates - 2022 Summary

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Summary of Changes

Due to the lack of Changelog posts since March 2022, the following is a list of exposed endpoints, enhancements, and bug-fixes specifically related to the NextGen APIs from April 2022 to January 2023.

VTS will continue to publish changelog posts at least once per month to summarize any changes or confirm that no functional endpoints or fields have been added.

April 2022

• Deal Comments Pagination error fixed
• Deal Financials: Include relationship to “Tenant Improvements”
• Options: Add Created at and Updated at fields

June 2022

• Financials: Filter by term_type enabled

July 2022

• Financials:End_date for “Free Rents” bug fix
• Financials: Displaying free_rent duration in API Response

August 2022

• Entity Relationship Model Published

September 2022

• Tenants: Add updated_at field
• Deal: Add Tenant Rep Broker field
• Financials: Add Created at and Updated at fields
• Budget: Add label and budget year fields

October 2022

• Deal Proposal: Add Proposal Execution Date
• Asset: Add Fund field

December 2022
Budget additions

• Expenses and Recoveries
• Free Rent
• Rent Schedule
• Deal additions
• Privacy fields
• Spaces
• Internal notes field

Bugs Fixes

• Budget: ID from relationship objects
• Budget: Building/Tenant Improvement response shape
• Deal: “Updated_at” field
• Financials: Fix Description on Deal Term Expense records
• Financials: Fix Recovery Type
• Lease Terms: Updated Readme documentation

January 2023
Budget additions

• Other Fees
• Leasing Commissions
• Base Rent units

Deal additions

• Rent Commencement date
• Proposal Label and Proposal Notes fields
• Lease Term
• Lease info object
• Leases
• Controller fixes
• Retail Sales
• Add Relationship object and link

API Updates

• Tenants API endpoint: the name attribute will now always return the reported tenant name (the name of the tenant as inputted on the lease or deal). We also added a global_tenant_name attribute which returns the global tenant name. The global tenant name is the "cleaned" tenant name as identified by VTS' Tenant Network Services. This is the same as the "linked" or "anchored" tenant name. For more details, please see https://help.vts.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408622298395-Tenant-Network-Services-Overview-FAQs

API Updates:

• New endpoint: Budgets API endpoint
• New endpoint: Blended Budgets API endpoint
• Options API endpoint: added support for a non-nested Options endpoint. Note we are aware of an issue when filtering this endpoint on Lease Term and are working on a fix
• Deal Tasks API endpoint: added support for a non-nested Deal Tasks endpoint

Budgets and Blended Budgets endpoints

A quick note on using the new Budgets and Blended Budgets endpoints -- we're working through some performance issues with these endpoints and recommend requesting fewer than 40 records for any call to these endpoints. We are working on making them more performant and aim to increase this limit to 100 records.

Note that budgets are associated with assets, spaces, and blended budgets but are not directly associated with deals. Rather, blended budgets are directly associated with deals and individual budgets are associated with deals through their blended budget relationship. For more information on budgets, please see our Help Center documentation

Blended budgets allow a user to compare a proposal against an aggregation of multiple budgets. For more information on blended budgets, please see our Help Center documentation

Calculated Metrics update

The calculate metrics are now considered generally available in the Deal Terms endpoint. Note that we do not support returning the NPV and IRR values as their long compute times may exceed our API time-out response limits. We are working on supporting these two values in the endpoints but do not have an estimated date of availability.

We do not have an ETA for when calculated metrics will be available in the Lease Terms endpoint.

New API Features:

API Updates:

• Deal Terms API endpoint: added a rent schedule attribute
• Marketing API endpoint: added Building listing status and a Space listing status fields
• Proposals API, Deal Iterations API, and Deal Approvals API endpoints: added support for non-nested calls to these endpoints
• Financials API endpoint (for both lease term and deal terms): added support for improvements, lease incentives, and other credits
• Tenant Updates API endpoint: fixed a typo in the 'owner' label and renamed the relationships label 'property' to 'asset' to align with our standard nomenclature
• Coming in December 2021 (in pilot): Deal Terms API, Lease Terms API, and Proposals API endpoints: added fields for calculated metrics (see more details below)

Calculated Metrics (in pilot)

Calculated metrics are represented on the VTS Lease front-end in the 'Proposal' tab under the 'Metrics' heading. These include fields such as NER, NPV, Net Rent, and GAAP Rent.

Calculated metrics are computed using a proposal's or deal term's various input parameters (duration, base rent, escalations, options, expenses and recoveries, and other costs and revenues). Some metrics are specific to a deal or lease term and some metrics are specific to a proposal. Other calculated metrics exist for both deal or lease terms and proposal objects. For example, consider a proposal that has 2 deal terms. Each deal term will have its own calculated NER value, and the corresponding proposal will have a NER value that is computed from the NER values of its two associated deal terms. Therefore, the deal and lease term endpoints will return an NER value and the proposal endpoint will return a possibly different NER value.

Note that returning the calculated metrics is in a pilot phase. Please reach out to your VTS rep to have these fields enabled for your API credentials.

Financials endpoint objects: Improvements, Incentives, and Other Credits

We added some new objects to the Financials endpoint (for both deal terms and lease terms) capturing expenses and recoveries associated with a deal or lease. This includes improvements of type building or tenant, lease incentives, and other credits. These are found on the VTS Lease front-end in the 'Expenses and Recoveries' section of a given deal or lease term. For more details on these objects, see the VTS Lease data dictionary at https://help.vts.com/hc/en-us/articles/4403703750939-VTS-Lease-Data-Dictionary.

New API Features:

• New endpoint: Support for a Deal Approvals API endpoint
• New endpoint: Support for a Deal Tasks API endpoint
• New endpoint: Support for a Global Tenants API endpoint ([see details below] (#global-tenants-api-endpoint))
• Add ability to filter API response data using a filter[updated_since] filter parameter (see details below)

API Updates:

• Deal Terms API and Lease Terms API endpoints: added a downtime attribute
• Deal Terms API endpoint: added relationships links to spaces and proposal
• Financials API endpoint: added relationships links to `deal term' IDs for 'commissions', 'rent escalations', and 'remaining lease obligation' objects
• Tenant Contacts API endpoint: added relationships links to 'tenant' ID

Global Tenants API endpoint

The 'Global Tenants' endpoint enables API access to the new VTS tenant linking feature. This feature anchors tenant entities to a standard tenant entity across your portfolio, regardless of how those tenant names are inputted into a lease or deal in the VTS database. This also allows a user to understand the hierarchy of their tenant entities via an Ultimate Parent ID relationship

The 'Tenants' endpoint contains a relationships.global_tenant_id attribute, which links to the tenant's Global Tenant ID.

Additional notes on the fields in this new endpoint:

New Feature: Filter API calls by Updated Date

You can now filter the result set for your API requests to return only data that has been created or modified since a given date. You can filter by date or timestamp. Value should be provided in ISO8601 format.
All times are interpreted in the UTC time zone.

How to use:
For any endpoint with a 'Last Updated' field, append this clause to the API call:

?filter[updated_since]=YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS

Additional Notes:

• The YYYY-MM-DD is required, but HH:MM:SS is optional
• The parameter value should be formatted in ISO8601 format (it may still parse in other date formats, but may produce unexpected results; however, it is guaranteed to work when given a valid ISO8601 date)
• The time zone is always interpreted as UTC (unless a timezone offset is explicitly mentioned)

curl -X GET -u "<api_key>:<api_secret>" "https://api.vts.com/api/v1/assets?filter[updated_since]=2021-10-12"