The cash you collect the month the space is filled

Owners talk about vacancy as a cost. Flip it. A vacant space is cash you are not collecting yet. The question is how many months of it you are willing to leave on the table.

Monthly cash collected = square feet x annual rent per SF / 12, plus CAM if it is NNN.

Three real examples from spaces we have worked:

Industrial building, Texas coast. 20,000 SF at $5.00 per SF NNN. $8,300 a month base. Vacant for a year: $100,000 not collected, before CAM recovery.

Retail corner suite, western Colorado. 1,300 SF at roughly $1,750 a month all in. Vacant for eight months: $14,000. Small number, but the suite had been empty since the previous tenant left and nobody local had been asked.

Freestanding retail, south Texas. 3,116 SF at $32 per SF NNN. $8,300 a month. The building had only ever been offered for sale. The first week of outbound produced the first lease conversations in its history.

Put your own numbers in. Then add the second line most owners forget: the months. A space that takes nine months to fill at a listing's pace, and three months with outbound, is six months of rent. On a $8,300 a month space that is $50,000. The campaign cost is a fraction of it.

Owners negotiate hard on $0.50 per SF and then let a space sit empty for a year waiting for the tenant who will pay it. On a 20,000 SF building, $0.50 per SF is $10,000 a year. One extra month of vacancy is $8,300. Speed is worth more than the last fifty cents.

That is also why we state rent as a monthly figure in every email. The operator reading it thinks in what leaves his bank account on the first, not in rate per foot. When one owner changed his campaign from "$8.50 to $9.00 per SF NNN" to "$5 NNN, roughly $8,300 a month for 20,000 SF," the replies changed from "what's the rate?" to "what's the yard like?"

A listing collects cash from the tenants who are searching. Outbound collects from the ones who are not. On most campaigns the interested replies come from businesses that had never seen the listing: the fabricator two miles away who is out of room, the salon owner renting a chair who wants her own storefront, the restaurant group in the next city that expands when someone hands it a corner.

The calculator on this page gives you the monthly number. The campaign is how you start collecting it.