by Kirk Layton, President & Co-Founder of The Tenex Group
What do your tenants actually think of you? Spoiler: They may not be as loyal as you think, and the data will tell you exactly why.
Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine your top tenant, the one who’s been with you for eight years, who always pays on time, who sends a fruit basket at Christmas. Now imagine they’ve been quietly shopping around for the past six months. They haven’t said a word. They just … started looking.
Sound far-fetched? It’s not. In fact, it’s happening in office buildings across the country right now. The problem isn’t that tenants leave; it’s that they leave quietly, and building managers rarely see it coming. The early warning signs are all there, they’re just not always easy to spot without the right tools.
Which brings us to the most underutilized asset in commercial real estate today: the tenant satisfaction survey.
The data that should be keeping you up at night
A landmark study by economists Juan Palacios of MIT and Nils Kok of Maastricht University analyzed more than 37,000 tenant surveys across 3,000 office buildings. What they found should be pinned to every asset manager’s wall. When tenant satisfaction increases by just one point on a 1-5 scale:
-
Willingness to renew rises 8.6%
-
Move-out probability drops 15.8%
-
Likelihood of recommending the building jumps 11.5%
And at the building level, a 10% increase in average satisfaction leads to 0.6% higher effective rent growth, 2.4% lower vacancy, and meaningfully higher asset value. These aren’t soft, feel-good numbers. They’re the kind of numbers that show up on a P&L.
So why aren’t more buildings asking?
It’s a fair question. The answer, if we’re being honest, usually comes down to one of three things: fear of bad news, lack of time, or the assumption that no news is good news. But none of those hold up under scrutiny.
Bad news you know about is infinitely better than bad news you don’t. Time? A well-designed survey takes tenants less than three minutes to complete. And that assumption that silence equals satisfaction? That’s the same logic that leads to a 15-year tenant walking out the door with two months’ notice and a polite smile.
The truth is, tenants who fill out surveys – even when the feedback is less than flattering – are telling you they still care enough to stay. It’s the ones who stop responding entirely that you need to worry about.
What to measure, and when
A good tenant satisfaction program doesn’t need to be complicated. At its core, you want to track a handful of things consistently:
-
Overall satisfaction with the building experience
-
Quality of building management and responsiveness
-
Perception of amenities and programming
-
Likelihood to renew (the ultimate leading indicator)
-
Likelihood to recommend (a proxy for pride in the building)
The cadence matters as much as the questions. Annual surveys catch long-term drift; quarterly pulse checks identify something going sideways before it becomes a crisis. And post-event or post-issue surveys, sent within a day or two of a building event, a disruption, or a maintenance resolution, are worth their weight in gold for measuring real-time impact.
Closing the loop is the whole point
Here’s where a lot of well-intentioned survey programs fall apart: they gather the data, file it away, and never act on it. From a tenant’s perspective, filling out a survey and hearing nothing back is almost worse than not being asked at all. It signals that the exercise was performative.
Close the loop. Always. That doesn’t mean you need to solve every problem overnight, but it does mean acknowledging the feedback, sharing what you learned (even at a high level), and communicating what’s changing as a result. Even a simple “we heard you, here’s what we’re going to do” email goes a long way toward building the kind of trust that translates directly to renewals.
In a market where tenants have options – and they do, from co-working spaces to hybrid-friendly suburban alternatives – the buildings that win aren’t necessarily the newest or the shiniest. They’re the ones where tenants feel seen, heard, and genuinely valued.
That starts with asking the question.
The truth is, tenants who fill out surveys – even when the feedback is less than flattering – are telling you they still care enough to stay. It’s the ones who stop responding entirely that you need to worry about.
