Commercial property owners who rely solely on standard reports tracking occupancy, rent collected, and open work orders may be missing the earliest signals of trouble, according to Zach Sanns, a commercial property manager based in Morristown, New Jersey. Sanns argues that the most important warning signs often sit outside those conventional columns, pointing to patterns that reveal what is about to happen rather than what already has.
“A report tells you what already happened,” Sanns said. “The signs I watch for are the ones that tell you what’s about to happen.” He emphasizes that a single late maintenance request is not a warning sign, but the same request appearing three times in different forms, from different tenants, over a few months, is. That distinction matters for property owners and managers who may treat each ticket as an isolated event rather than a symptom of a deeper issue.
One of the first things Sanns 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 said. “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.” He notes that response time drift is easy to overlook because each individual delay seems small, but added together over a quarter, they point to a building slowly falling behind on its maintenance schedule. For tenants, that can mean deteriorating conditions; for owners, it can signal rising costs and deferred repairs.
Tenant complaints are a normal part of running a commercial building, but Sanns says the warning sign is not the complaint itself—it is 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 said. “That’s one problem showing up four times.” Property managers who treat each complaint as an isolated ticket miss the pattern underneath it. Looking across tenants, not just within one lease, is how a shared system issue gets caught before it becomes a larger repair, potentially saving significant disruption and expense.
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 said. “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, a parking area, or a 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 said. “It just didn’t get prioritized. That’s worth noticing before a tenant notices it first.”
The habit Sanns recommends to owners is simple: track trends, not just totals. “A single number on a report doesn’t tell you much by itself,” he said. “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 said. “They mean it’s time to look closer before it is.” The goal, he adds, is not to eliminate every small issue but to catch the ones building toward something bigger while they are still small enough to fix without disruption to tenants or a strain on the budget.
