Two finite projects, $294,895 a year: inside a campus and commercial-property audit

Why real estate is different

A property manager lives by NOI per square foot. But the telecom, technology, and utility spend running through every building you manage is almost never visible at that granularity. It’s buried in invoices addressed to entities, not properties, and no one reconciles it back to the asset. You can’t optimize what you can’t see, and at the property level, almost no one can.

American University introduced TruNorth to Avison Young, one of the largest commercial real estate services firms in the country, who brought us in to tackle two contained projects.

What two finite projects recovered

This was not a multi-year transformation. It was two scoped audits, and they returned $294,895 per year at an 89% average reduction:

• The campus radio operation (WAMU): $285,254/year recovered, a 92% reduction on its category.
• Commercial properties: $9,641/year at a 41% reduction. This is the number that matters most for a REIT, because it’s a property-level result, not a media one.

On the full ~$3M technology spend across the relationship, the modeled opportunity is $1.23M (41%).

The pattern that travels

The mechanics here are exactly what we’d run across a portfolio: inventory every line back to a real property and use, confirm with the people on site what’s actually needed, disconnect the rest, renegotiate with aggregated buying power, and then defend the savings, including re-routing customer-of-record cleanly when a property is acquired or sold.

For an owner-operator or a property manager, that translates directly to NOI, a single source of truth your asset managers and your board can both trust, and one audit-grade data file for ESG and SEC climate disclosure.

See what we’d find in your portfolio. Take the 60-second Phantom Tax check, or book 15 minutes with us.