How Many Properties Should One Commercial Property Manager Handle?

Nobody has published an answer. That is the honest starting point, and it is worth sitting with for a second.

Not BOMA International. Not IREM. Not the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Search the published materials of the national management firms — CBRE, JLL, Cushman & Wakefield, Colliers, Newmark, Lincoln Property, Transwestern, Hines — and you will not find a staffing standard either.

So if you have gone looking for this number and come up empty, the problem is not your research. The industry maintains an ANSI-approved floor measurement standard for each of six property types (BOMA) and has no current national benchmark for how much building one person can actually run.

A property manager’s workload is the volume of decisions, communications, and obligations attached to the assets they carry — not the number of addresses on their list. That is our view rather than a finding, and the rest of this piece is the case for it.

Has anyone actually measured this?

Twice, in two metros, and the most recent attempt was eight years ago.

The BOMA Georgia Foundation commissioned a Metro-Atlanta Commercial Real Estate Staffing Ratio Study in 2016, covering 26 ownership and management organizations, 110 buildings, and roughly 27 million square feet (BOMA Georgia Foundation). A Dallas Metro companion followed in 2018 (catalog). They cost $155 and $185. They are the only two we can find; the Foundation’s catalog has not added a third. The Atlanta study reports 0.952 property management staff and 1.244 engineering staff per 200,000 square feet (CRE Insight Journal).

Note the unit. The only organization that seriously measured this did not count properties. It counted headcount per 200,000 square feet. The one group that tried rejected property count as the denominator before it started.

And here is the part worth reading twice. CRE Insight Journal, a BOMA Georgia publication, put that study’s engineering figure beside a working practitioner’s — Chris Lelle, Portfolio Chief Engineer at Lincoln Property Company, who says his firm typically employs one engineer per 250,000 square feet. The article runs the conversion itself: the study’s number comes out at 1.55 engineers per 250,000 square feet against Lelle’s 1.00. A 55% difference, which the article attributes to five years of thinner staffing between the 2016 survey and 2021 practice — offering greater expectations of engineers, better technology, and industry hardship as possible causes, without settling among them (CRE Insight Journal, July 19, 2021).

So the two available numbers for the same metric sit 55% apart, and the publication that put them side by side declined to reconcile them. Its stated conclusion is that there is no one-size-fits-all rule and that owners should staff against their own tenant mix and needs.

Two caveats, since we would rather you trust the rest of this. Lelle’s figure is one practitioner quoted in a trade article, not a published Lincoln Property standard — we looked and no corporate version exists. And both numbers describe engineering staff rather than property managers. The honest reading is not "here are two ratios" but "the only two numbers anyone has put side by side disagreed by half."

What actually drives the workload?

Not buildings; it’s the tenants and the vendors in those buildings and the communication and projects they generate. And specifically it’s the follow-up to ensure everything is complete and to standard.

The clearest current data comes from Building Engines — a JLL company — in its 2026 State of Commercial Property Management Technology, produced with BOMA International and based on a survey of more than 350 CRE professionals, two-thirds of them in commercial office. Vendor-sponsored research, and we will say so plainly, but it is the only current commercial-specific dataset on this question.

Three findings matter here:

• Tenant comfort issues make up 62% of all requests — unchanged from the prior year.
• More than half of property teams spend over five hours every week going back and forth with tenants about those requests. Five hours is most of a working day, every week, on follow-up alone.
• 66.40% named email as their most effective tenant communication method. A tenant app or software platform came second, at 14.63%.

As JLL’s Aliza Carpio puts it in the report: "When most of that communication happens through email instead of a system designed for tenant management, property teams spend way too much time tracking down information. Property managers end up digging through their inbox to find details before a client meeting or when they need to pull together reports."

None of that scales with building count. It scales with how many tenants you have and how much they need.

The same "one property" is not the same amount of work

The Building Engines data splits by asset class, and the split is stark.

Among the 84 respondents managing industrial, the top challenges were preventive maintenance (54.76%), utility and energy costs (35.71%), then health and safety compliance and logistics and traffic flow (27.38% each). Tenant mix ranked seventh, at 16.67%.

Among the 80 working in retail, the top concerns were maintaining common areas and securing the right tenant mix — with more than half monitoring common area maintenance and 43% tracking lease renewal rates.

Those are different jobs. A manager with ten single-tenant warehouses and a manager with ten multi-tenant strip centers are not doing comparable work, and no count of properties will tell you that.

The federal building census makes the point from another direction, though it cuts both ways. EIA’s Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey counts roughly 4.7 million US commercial buildings with a single establishment — about four in five — against 811,000 with two to five and 82,000 with more than ten (EIA CBECS 2018, Table B17). Establishments are not the same thing as leases, so read that as a shape rather than a tenant count. Most buildings really are simple. But portfolios are not assembled at random, and the ones that break a manager are built from the tail. A property count does not tell you which end of that distribution you are holding.

Staffing by property count is staffing a hospital by counting buildings.

So what should you count instead?

Four things, in roughly this order of usefulness.

Tenants, not buildings

Every tenant is a relationship with its own lease, its own renewal clock, and its own requests. Twelve tenants across two buildings is often more work than four tenants across six — though six buildings is also six roofs and six vendor sets, which is exactly why you count both rather than picking one.

Lease events in the next twelve months

Expirations, renewal option deadlines, CAM reconciliations, estoppel requests, escalations. These are knowable a year ahead and they are the spikes that break a schedule. A portfolio with nine expirations next year is a different assignment from the same portfolio with two.

Request volume, and the follow-up it generates

Given that tenant comfort drives 62% of requests and more than half of teams lose five-plus hours a week to the back-and-forth, this is measurable, and it is where the time actually goes. Count the threads, not just the work orders.

Asset class and tenancy structure

In our experience single-tenant NNN industrial is among the lowest-touch square footage in commercial real estate, and multi-tenant office on full-service gross leases among the highest. Treating them as interchangeable is how a reasonable-looking portfolio becomes an unreasonable one.

Run those four against your actual team and you have something a ratio was never going to give you: a workload picture specific to your portfolio. It will not be comparable to anyone else’s. That is fine — nobody else’s is comparable either, which is the point.

The part most owners skip

Here is the operational reality underneath all of this: you cannot count what you cannot see.

If tenant requests arrive by email, follow-up lives in individual inboxes, lease dates live in a spreadsheet, and vendor history lives in someone’s memory, then none of those four numbers is retrievable. You can estimate them, but you cannot measure them. An estimate is what produces a staffing decision that feels fine right up until the quarter where one property manager carries nine renewals and four hundred emails and quietly stops keeping up with the workload.

This is the principle we call Execution is the Goal: identify, execute, communicate, and track it through to completion with visibility the whole way. The tracking is not administrative overhead. It is the only thing that turns a workload question into an answerable one.

Where Cardinal fits

Cardinal came out of an ownership operation, so we have had to answer this question for our own team rather than in the abstract.

The platform holds communication, issues, leases, documents, and vendor history against the property instead of against the person — which means tenant count, open issue volume, lease events, and the real communication load are things you can pull up rather than estimate. That is a precondition for staffing honestly, not a substitute for judgment.

We will be straight about the limits. Cardinal will not tell you how many properties one manager should handle. No software will, and as of today no published source will either. What it will do is let you ask the better question — how much work is actually attached to these assets — and get an answer with numbers in it.

If someone eventually runs the national study this industry has gone without since 2018, we will be first in line to read it. Until then, the only benchmark that means anything is the one measured on your own portfolio.

Sources

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook: Property, Real Estate, and Community Association Managers (2025 base year). bls.gov
• BOMA Georgia Foundation, 2016 Metro-Atlanta Commercial Real Estate Staffing Ratio Study (26 organizations, 110 buildings, ~27M SF; $155). bomageorgiafoundation.org
• BOMA Georgia Foundation, research catalog (2018 Dallas Metro study, $185). bomageorgiafoundation.org
• CRE Insight Journal (a BOMA Georgia publication), Alec Burchett, "Staffing for Your Properties: Exploring O+M Staffing Ratios and Outsourcing," July 19, 2021. creinsightjournal.com
• Building Engines (a JLL company), "The State of Commercial Property Management Technology, 2026," produced with BOMA International, January 2026 (n = 350+; vendor-sponsored). buildingengines.com
• U.S. Energy Information Administration, Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey 2018, Table B17. eia.gov
• BOMA International, BOMA Standards. boma.org