Commercial property reports typically focus on metrics such as occupancy rates, rent collection, and open work orders. But according to Zach Sanns, a commercial property manager based in Morristown, New Jersey, the most telling signals often fall outside those standard columns. "A report tells you what already happened," Sanns says. "The signs I watch for are the ones that tell you what's about to happen."
Sanns emphasizes that warning signs are patterns, not isolated events. A single late maintenance request is not necessarily a red flag, but the same request appearing three times in different forms from different tenants over a few months is. One of the first things he checks is how long it takes to close a work order, not just whether it gets done. "If a repair used to take two days and now takes five, that's worth asking about," he says. "It might be a vendor that's stretched too thin, or a part that's harder to get than it used to be. Either way, it's information." This response time drift is easy to overlook because each delay seems minor, but added together over a quarter, they indicate a building slowly falling behind on its maintenance schedule.
Tenant complaints are a normal part of running a commercial building, but Sanns says the warning sign is not the complaint itself—it's where it lands. "If different tenants on the same floor start mentioning the same issue, temperature, noise, water pressure, that's not four separate problems," he says. "That's one problem showing up four times." Property managers who treat each complaint as an isolated ticket may miss the underlying pattern. Looking across tenants, not just within one lease, is how a shared system issue gets caught before it becomes a larger repair.
Sanns also watches for changes in vendor invoices that are not matched by a change in the work being done. "If a service cost is going up and the scope hasn't changed, I want to know why before I approve it again," he says. "Sometimes it's a fair adjustment. Sometimes it's a sign the vendor relationship needs a second look." He applies the same thinking to common areas. Wear in a lobby, parking area, or shared hallway that nobody has scheduled to address is, in his view, a budget decision happening by default rather than on purpose. "Nobody decided to let that go," he says. "It just didn't get prioritized. That's worth noticing before a tenant notices it first."
The habit Sanns recommends to property owners is simple: track trends, not just totals. "A single number on a report doesn't tell you much by itself," he says. "What tells you something is whether that number is moving, and in which direction." He points to a few areas worth following over time rather than month to month in isolation: how long repairs take to close, how often the same type of complaint comes up across different tenants, and whether vendor costs are climbing faster than the work itself.
"None of these signs mean something is broken," Sanns says. "They mean it's time to look closer before it is." The goal is not to eliminate every small issue in a commercial building, but to catch the ones building toward something bigger while they are still small enough to fix without disrupting tenants or straining the budget. For property owners and managers, adopting this pattern-focused approach could mean the difference between routine maintenance and costly emergency repairs, ultimately protecting both tenant satisfaction and the bottom line.
