Shared HVAC, blanket insurance, elevators, janitorial and common-area utilities rarely get allocated the way they should. Misallocation alone can inflate component OpEx by up to 18%. We audit the categories, fix the allocation, and renegotiate the vendors charging above market.
Zero tenant disruption · Works across retail, office and residential components
Mixed-use CAM charges inflated by misallocation — the highest rate of any property type. (National Lease Advisors via PredictAP)
Share of CAM reconciliations that contain material billing errors when audited. (Tango Analytics via Springbord)
Average recovery on billed CAM charges when professionally audited. (Springbord)
A blanket insurance policy prices for the highest-risk component — usually the restaurant or retail user — and then gets allocated pro-rata back to residential and office tenants who aren't driving that risk. Elevator contracts get split by square footage instead of call frequency, which skews heavily residential in vertical buildings. Central HVAC allocates by SF even though commercial loads are 2–3x residential loads per foot. Shared utilities without sub-metering get estimated. The result: the component paying the most isn't the one generating the cost.
IREM publishes a dedicated course on this (MXD201) because the allocation is genuinely hard. But allocation is only half of the problem — the other half is that the underlying vendor contracts were never competitively bid in the first place. We fix both: rebuild the allocation methodology using the ULI/BOMA standards, then shop the contracts that drive the biggest dollars.
P&L, CAM rec, lease summary by component, service contracts. We organize it.
Usage-based allocation for utilities and HVAC, risk-weighted allocation for insurance, BOMA 2024 methodology for CAM, and market rates for each component type.
We handle the outreach, proposals and contract redlines. You approve every transition.
Overlapping service windows, component-by-component handoff, and a single point of contact through go-live.
Stabilizing a new asset and setting up allocation correctly from day one.
Residential over retail/office where elevator and HVAC allocation drive disputes.
Large master-planned developments with shared amenities.
Where inherited allocation methodology was the seller's, not yours.
Possibly — but the right kind. If your current allocation is overcharging a tenant, fixing it makes you legally defensible when a CAM audit eventually arrives. If it's undercharging a component, fixing it recovers revenue. We document the basis for every change.
Yes — usage-based proxy allocation is workable for most utilities. But sub-metering typically pays back within one year and eliminates the dispute, so we'll often recommend it.
Yes. Smaller mixed-use assets often have worse allocation than institutional-grade buildings because nobody has professionalized the CAM structure. Those are usually the highest-ROI engagements.
Both. Property insurance on mixed-use is complicated enough that we often run it as its own workstream with a specialist broker.
Take the 2-minute Savings Assessment and we'll come back to you with a tailored read on where your property likely sits versus market.