MIAMI—The updated Financial Account Standards Board (FASB) Lease Accounting Standards will be finalized by the end of the summer. These changes will radically transform lease accounting, with significant consequences to a company's financial results, according to Avison Young.

Under the updated rules, for example, operating leases are pretty much dead, the firm reports, and virtually all leases will be recognized on a firm's balance sheet. What's more, the traditional method of using the discounted cash flow to analyze lease deals will no longer be enough because two leases with identical cash flows can have significantly different impacts on both the balance sheet and income statement.

We caught up with Michael Vullis, principal with Avison Young who oversees the Florida region's 12 million-square-foot property management portfolio, for his insights. He told us property management has recently shifted dramatically from the “commoditized fixer-upper” or “rent collector” to a valuable extension of the asset manager.