6 Signs an Office Property Is Well-Managed

For both prospective tenants and potential investors, evaluating how effectively an office property is managed can be a critical but elusive task. How do you ascertain if a building is being managed to a standard that will make it a comfortable environment for your business or a prudent investment?

To help answer that query, LoopNet enlisted the expertise of Javier Lezamiz, senior managing director and New York lead for Cushman & Wakefield’s asset services team. Lezamiz possesses nearly 30 years of experience in commercial property management. In his current role, he is responsible for managing 650 employees providing management services to approximately 47 million square feet of commercial space spread across more than 220 properties in New York City and on Long Island.

To state the obvious, that’s a lot of space — in fact, according to Crain’s New York Business, it makes C&W the largest commercial property manager in New York City.

Based on our conversation with Lezamiz, LoopNet identified the following six criteria that investors and tenants can use to identify a well-managed commercial property.

• Branding.
• Staff awareness.
• Common area maintenance.
• Property certifications.
• Management structure.
• Tenant engagement.

According to Lezamiz one of the easiest ways to identify if a commercial property is well-managed is to peruse the signage, typically located on the building’s façade or in the lobby, that identifies who the property manager is.

For every property that his team manages, Lezamiz said that “Right at the front door, you'll see a plaque that is prominently affixed to the building that says, ‘Cushman and Wakefield, managing agent.’”

While reputation doesn’t mean everything, gaining an understanding of the company that manages the property — whether it’s a prominent manager like C&W or a small property owner’s in-house team — can set appropriate expectations for how the property is run.

A diligent investor or tenant should do some basic research about the property manager, including the number of properties they’re responsible for, their years in business and reviews from former tenants and clients.

While C&W oversees a diverse range of properties in terms of class, size and function, Lezamiz suggested the ability to manage different assets in the same manner suggests a high level of management acumen.

“When you're able to take your brand and replicate it identically across other assets, that is key to most people distinguishing us versus our competitors or distinguishing one owner versus another,” he added.

Moreover, if that sign is absent, obscured or less than conspicuously displayed, it suggests that no one is particularly interested in taking responsibility for or being associated with the property. In that case, it’s likely that potential tenants and investors probably won’t want to be linked with it either.

In properties that are large enough to have building staff stationed in the lobby, whether it’s security, concierge or a porter, you should pay attention to how the staff acts and appears, Lezamiz said.

Lezamiz said that tenants and investors should expect building staff that is appropriately attired and attentive. Given the security concerns that have emerged in many of the country’s urban centers, you want “a security staff or concierge in your lobby that gives you a sense of wellbeing.”

This means that the staff should be courteous, but also clear about their responsibilities and the required conduct of visitors to the property. According to Lezamiz, a good staff will make visitors and tenants alike feel both “welcomed” and like they are “looking out for me.”

Prospective tenants and investors will want to carefully scrutinize the appearance of all building common areas, including the lobby, corridors, elevators and amenity spaces.

All of these common areas should be “clean and well-lit,” Lezamiz said. If there are stray pieces of garbage — a piece of paper here, a food wrapper there — or perhaps a light bulb that needs to be replaced, these are potentially signs that the property isn’t being maintained properly.

Further, if the common areas that are in public view appear to be dirty or in disrepair, it has negative implications for other parts of the property.

In that scenario, “I could imagine in the mechanical rooms and so forth, how dirty they must be,” Lezamiz said.

Speaking of the mechanical rooms, while tenants, and sometimes even prospective investors, aren’t generally permitted access to those spaces, Lezamiz suggested that building certifications can serve as a proxy to investigating those systems.

In particular, Lezamiz said that tenants and investors should look for a LEED or Fitwel certification. LEED certification focuses on how building systems impact the environment, while Fitwel evaluates how effectively a property supports the health and wellbeing of its tenants by examining features such as indoor air quality and access to outdoor space, among numerous other metrics. WELL is an alternative certification that is comparable to Fitwell.

Lezamiz said that the presence of these certifications suggests “that the standards of the property management team are very high when it comes to indoor air quality and when it comes to providing the most sustainable type of services to any of the occupants of that building, because those certifications are very hard to attain.”

Lezamiz said that, ideally, a property will have a dedicated property manager, and even more optimally, one that is located on site. However, he acknowledged that many properties lack the size to justify their own property manager and he said that shouldn’t disqualify them from being well-managed.

More importantly, interested parties will want to understand how much experience the property manager has. Further, because effective property management often “takes a village,” as Lezamiz put it, the most important question might be what kind of support system is in place.

“If a property manager is across three, four or five properties of a similar size, but they're properly supported with assistant managers or administrators, that property manager could still be just as effective as a dedicated property manager.”

Ultimately, good property management is “always about tenant satisfaction,” Lezamiz said. “Happy tenants are more likely to renew their leases and refer others to that property.”

While it may not be possible to query tenants directly about their feelings on the property, inquiring with the property manager about how they interact with tenants will give interested parties a sense of how engaged the tenant populace is. For instance, Lezamiz said that a good property manager will be conducting regular tenant surveys and hosting periodic events.

But beyond those initiatives, it’s important for a property manager to have regular facetime with their tenants. Lezamiz said that he likes to meet with his tenants weekly, because their operational challenges really could impact how he operates the building. “Having that one-on-one” will result in “a tenant who's satisfied and enjoys being at the property.”